Inventory and Hexes

This last month has slowly brought some new features up for display in the Aeges Project. As stated in one of my previous blogs, I have put the inventory on a grid as you can see the screen shot below. A little bit of work has been put into implementing day and night, as well as keeping track of days. There is also good improvement in foilage and the level is building really nicely right now which brings me to my next item checked off the list.

I am a constant tester and tweaker, so after building two full 'basic' levels and performance maintained, I decided to try doing a single level. With a little partitioning of spaces things seem to be going well. I didn't any dynamic level loaded like I had planed, but rather I load the entire scene, and let each object add itself into its partitioned space. So far it functions almost as well as the individual layers, and still loads almost as fast. Right now on my MacBook I am getting a 4 second load time, while on my old 1.3Ghz I am getting a 10 second level load time.

Finally, the current project is somewhat undoing a change I made. I made the comment that I was going off the grid, and now I half repent of that decision. Exploration feels a lot better with free movement and not being tied to a grid, but tactical combat was suffering from a lot of silliness because of it. So now, when combat starts the players are aligned to the nearest grid and kept on the grid for the duration of the skirmish.

My biggest gripe with the isometric 2:1 grid for combat was range. Range was always fairly clumsy and the results were a bit unreal, especially when attaching to the East or West. So after playing around with some planning software I decided that a hex grid would be ideal and I could use it with all existing artwork with exception to doors. The results seem to be much more consistent. Beyond this, just more of the same. :)