-Sigh-

Sometimes, sometimes….

So… I find myself love making tools and QOL changes for tools than making content.. hmm.. For QOL (quality of life) changes for a programmer, there are two sections. One are code QOL changes. Compartmentalize various code pieces to make the project easier to maintain as a whole. And two, usage QOL changes. For instance, automate some kind of workflow to make using the tool less frustrating and/or to ramp up content production using that tool.

In this case, it’s the map editor. While it technically has everything I need now, I ended up going down the QOL hole. Fill layer, clear layer. Fillsets (I need to look up the new technical term) for filling a layer with a random set of tiles (like different grasses so it doesn’t look bland). And as a result… ended up revamping the animations. So initially, and how the whole thing is based on, there were 2 layers, then 4 “animated” layers, which I referred to as a single animated layer previously. The animated layers really consisted of 4 layers each, and each animation layer gets cycled through every 250 seconds.

Literally, 5 minutes before turning in for the night, I had an epiphany. Normally, I would shy away from animations because I didn’t like simple few frames animations, so I kept things simple. However… ugh. RABBIT HOLES! To make a long story short, after a code backup, I ended up working out an unlimited animation framed tile for all layers. This gives 6 full layers under and 6 full layers above players. Each tile can have it’s own animation. This should help with the water movement.

Even with the above, I am limiting the frames to 60 frames per second. Since I am locking the game to 60 FPS, this should be fine.

So… Writers would know of the terms Pantster and Plotter (outlining). For programming terms, it’s programming from the hip or using a WBS (work breakdown structure) chart. For my day job, I use a WBS chart. For home… not so much. Thanks to that stupid epiphany last night, I spent today’s session ripping all the tiling code and animated layers and replacing them with a unified tile (that can use both static and animated graphics) that can be added to any of the 12 layers.

So.. useful long term. Sucked for today’s session. Looking at my list of things I want to get done on the Map Editor before moving back to client/server… I have a few QOL to make me -NOT- go insane using this. And I need to flesh out some special tiles. aka, player, npc blocks, lights, that sort of thing. The intermediate map file format doesn’t need to change, however. So that’s good.