Back to Development!

Hrm, I haven’t gone this long without an update in a while… After working on the same project for a few years now, I found I needed a break doing something else for a while as well as a little time away from the screen. It’s probably good for me.

I’ve also been working on a lot of different things, which certainly slows down visible progress down when there’s only one developer working. I’m still working on the ports, but also a few fixes for the mod kit, and a few gameplay bugs, game dev tools, some brand new code for future projects, various experiments, and new game designs and prototypes.

I’m planning on doing an beta patch/update to Banished in the next couple weeks, which should include the following:

– The game (and modkit) will properly use the Textile limit, which should make some mods easier to play once updated. It also allows configuring places like farms, foresters, and orchards a type of resource it creates, so a mod could have a farm that grew cotton that obeys the textile limit.

– The game will use my SRSL language for materials, so any future ports to other platforms will hopefully just work graphics-wise.

– Lots of internal changes to the tech that shouldn’t actually change anything but need beta testing. Most of these are things that were changed to enable other platforms, such as using UTF8 for text, rendering changes to support OpenGL and other graphics APIs, and versioning code to load old save games and mods, which have changed format slightly.

– Various bug fixes that I’ll detail later when I release a beta patch.

I’m doing internal testing of all these changes and playing the game a bit to make sure I didn’t break anything too obvious. Once I’m satisfied I haven’t done anything too bad, I’ll release a beta patch for modders and anyone that wants to test the new code.