I also did a quick update to the roadmap to close on 0.3.1 and update the list of tasks for 0.3.2. One of the new feature task I added is a map importer, which is a often requested feature and something that myself wanted to add from the beginning. It seems this would be a good point to start on it. I also removed the “shader“ task. Not that I don’t think the game would improve from implementing proper shaders. Nevertheless, I thing it would be to big of a task, considering I have very little experience with shaders, and that it would provide little benefit at this point barring an overhaul of the simulation engine. In it’s place I added a (???) secret task. It’s not going to be a big deal, but I feel it would be nice to keep it as a surprise for when it’s done.

So I already started working on the map importer. I originally wanted it to be a full fledged a map editor but I deemed it to be unnecessary. There are already many good map/image editors out there and the game doesn’t need to be burdened with a mediocre one. The importer itself is going to be limited to grayscale heightmaps for now. I might even constrain it to specific dimensions (400x200) depending on how much work it would be to handle alternate image/map sizes.

Anyway, I’m still defining many details so you’ll have to wait until next week. With some luck I might even be able to showcase some example imports.