People are building some amazing castles for Fortress. A picture speaks a thousands words so…
Amazing Contributions
September 3, 2007Map generation and the Hill algorithm.
August 16, 2007The last couple have weeks have seen me busy on a random map generator. This will, eventually, become a separate binary able to generate maps for Fortress. It will have support for a couple height-map algorithms, different landscape generation, and hopefully also beginner-castle generation. The ultimate plan is to have this part of a map editing suite which will ship along side Fortress. Here is a screen shot of a map generated using the Hill algorithm. The Hill algorithm is pretty simple one. It creates a whole bunch of semi-circles (hill) stacked on one another which ultimately will resemble a hilly landscape.
- Pick a random spot on the map (rx,ry)
- Pick a random radius size (radius)
- For each pixel on the map (x,y)
- Apply the following equation ignoring negative values:
- height[rx][ry] += radius^2 + ((x-rx)^2 – (y-ry)^2)
- Rinse, Lather and repeat about 1000 times.
When this is all done, we normalize the data to bring it all between 0 and 1 and display it. In the case of the following screen shot I have chosen to display the heights using a color gradient from black (0,0,0) to white (1,1,1) where the darker colors are the peaks of the hills.
Currently this takes rather long to render, since every time a new hill is added the ENTIRE grid is recalculated. One fix I must add soon is that only the affected pixels, basically, the pixels in a circle of size (2radius+2)*2) around center point (rx,ry) are analyzed each time a new hill is added. Anyway, this code is all in SVN, and new features will be added continuously.
On a final note, a birdy told me that Charlie is working his magic in the background, and the forums are showing signs of some new graphics and other tasty ideas. We are always looking for new contributors, so feel free to swing by and say hi.
And The Lord Said…
July 17, 2007
Slowly Does It
July 17, 2007I’ve added a basic game menu and loading animation whilst the game world is populated. Obviously (from previous screenshots) the game world is still a bit sparse but the aim is to change that over the next couple of weeks.
I’m going to concentrate on a few game objects:
- Towers and walls – the basics of a castle :-)
- Trees
- Hills
That will give us something that almost looks like a game. Of course the challenge after that will be to turn it into a game but hopefully by then it will generate a bit more interest so I won’t have to shoulder all the burden myself. Regardless, it’ll be at least a few months before something playable emerges and even then it’ll just be a demo. Still, each step is a step closer, eh?
New website and new prototype
July 16, 2007There are numerous reasons why we have migrated away from the SourceForge to host our development blog. They aren’t particularly important so I won’t delve into them. We are still using SourceForge as our project host for our SVN repository.
In other news Charlie has been working on the second UI protoype, which includes an isometric map, and most importantly, vexi3. I invite you all to check it out from SVN and take a look. Information on how to obtain and run Fortress within vexi is detailed in this thread.
I am still trying to learn how to use vexi so I can contribute. My first commit creates a checkbox that inverts mouse movement. I’m very proud of my achievement, having never done any JavaScript, nor vexi, and being quite low on free-time to contribute. Look for more from me in the future.
Fortress is slowly coming together, and we have a lot of goals that are going to make this a fun project. If you are interested in helping out, we are always looking for developers, artists, designers, and everything else an Open Source project could need. Swing by the forums and say hello!
The Fortress 
