Full Swing.

Mostly back into the swing of things, school starts for me next week. It's taken me almost two months but I'm working again, just started last Wednesday. It was the first time I've had a break longer than a month during which I didn't have to work or go to class. However, it by no means implies I sat around the entire time being lazy. I've done a considerable amount of programming in the last month, and I'm about to detail it for you now.

It seems I'm actually somewhat incapable of just sitting around doing NOTHING which I feel is productive. When I was in Japan I mentioned that I had lost a considerable amount of programming work when my computer crashed. Well, one of my first projects after returning from the far east was to re-write the network library I lost which I wrote about in my post BasicNet. I am attempting to make all of this work lead up to a final project which I already have in mind. ( But, I'm not sharing that quite yet ;-p )

I had written my own GUI library for SDL however having lost that I decided it was too much work to do over again and decided to use a library which I could use for free called GuiChan which you can find at the website for SDL by searching in their list of libraries.

Since I finished BasicNet, what I've been writing is for an isometric engine for an RPG. And, after one month of coding I'm getting close to having something relatively substantial. What appears in the screenshot above is from the Map Editor for the game. Well, the editor for the game is actually built into the game, you can switch between the map editor and game logic, and save and load maps to disk. I've created classic RPG styled windows for use with menus and dialogs. You can load and save maps, draw objects onto the map, set base tiles with overlays. Objects can respond to mouse clicks. Keyboard strokes as well, although I haven't technically tested this functionality. I'm currently working on creating NPC characters which you can talk to. I've done almost all of this by myself. Recently, however, my friend Seth as begun to help me bit by bit. He is working more on concept for the game and story but he is also writting the code which will do pathfinding for walking by clicking the mouse on the map.

We're not ready to tell the world what the game is going to be about, but thus far I'm very happy with where it's going. I do wish to say however that though I am making a game with what we have so far it is not actually the end project I have in mind. It will take some time for me to get to where I need to be because this end project is far more complicated than a simple RPG of any time. As far as I know, nothing like it has been done quite this way before and I'm hoping to do it before someone else does. Hence, the secrecy. ;-) Till then, just look forward to when I can finally put up a version of what I'm writting now up for download.

Oh and BTW, I just want to note that though if you look closely at the screenshot you can tell it was taken on a MAC but It runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows (I'm assuming vista compatibility though untested)