This week in review…

This week I was planning on building a really big town to test end game play. The screenshot above shows about as far as I got. Unfortunately I ran into a lot of bugs and gameplay issues that I’ve been ignoring for a while. So I fixed them instead.

I’ve been wanting an alternative fuel source to replace firewood, so mines can now result in coal as well as iron ore. This can reduce the need for so much forest area at the expense of having more miners. The people in the game can then use either coal or firewood to heat their homes. Coal can also be used in by blacksmiths to make steel tools which last longer than iron tools.

Buildings like the mine that result in large numbers of resources are no longer removable from the landscape. The upside of these buildings is that they produce massive amounts of iron, coal, and stone. The downside is that while the player can remove the wooden or stone part of the structure, they leave a heap of dirt or a pit in the ground, and the land is wasted forever.

I also did some experiments with absolutely huge maps. This led to me to see some obvious areas of the code that need optimization. The game still runs fairly well with huge maps, but I’ll have to play the game to the point where 1000’s of AI’s are running to see if performance can be maintained over such a large area.

I also tweaked crop rotation some more – the player is dealing with so many things that not having to rotate which crops so frequently is much better.

Despite all those game changes, most the time was spent tracking and fixing bugs. I fixed stuck tool-tips, some random ui bugs, path finding bugs, and some crashes in ai code. I made a bunch of bug fixes to the video interface, especially dealing with switching between full screen and windowed mode. Not a bad week.