A lot of our time over the last week on the programming side has been spent updating our internal documentation. Since we invested so heavily in back-end programming for the game, there are a lot of systems that we’ve written but have not spent a lot of time interacting with yet. And because we want the game’s content to be malleable enough that people on the team with no programming skill can edit and create content, they need to have reference to consult. It’s not the most exciting work in game development but it needs to be done.

While waiting for some last bits of an object systems rewrite to be finished, I’ve been implementing some of the “high prairie” (aka Yellowstone) biome code that we were talking about at the beginning of the month, with the hope that we can start showing some more varied screenshots. It’s still a work in progress, but here’s where it’s at right now.

The biome transitions are still basically straight lines at this point and we’re going to try to cram a bit more biodiversity and foliage variation in there to make things seem a bit more realistic (There was an extensive discussion on the subject of diseased trees). Note also that this is the upper plateau segment of the high prairie biome which is dryer and colder. The lower areas will generally be more green and lush with broadleaf forest.

We’ve done some work to reduce the appearance of terrain texture tiling artifacts (notably some clever spells cast by Mr. Whitman) which has paid off very nicely, and the process of creating terrain is starting to speed up a great deal.

To do this week: work party controls (so you don’t just get anyone doing everything), greener pastures, and hopefully the death of the object framework rewrite. Death in a good way, that is.