Pretty wowing, just to mention myself here...
Whayt's Your timetable so far, as this appears to be something one ccould spend a decade or more on?
Viewing post in Hi Calandiel
Hi!
I started this project a year or so ago, but the vast majority of it was in various experiments and what I would call "engine work". Not going into technical details but this project is doing a lot of weird things that afaik not many other games do (like having most algorithms be world topology agnostic so that things like tile shape and neighborhoods can be easily swapped and compare with each other).
When it comes to "simulation" coding, I spent around a month and a half on it, after which I spent a month and a half working on 3d rendering. first person control, game physics, and UI.
The current goal is to get more feedback on world generation algorithms and incorporate it while I work on combat and spawning animals in the 3d world. In an ideal world there'll be a tiny open world rpg tech demo by the end of the year and after that I'll be working on procedural generation of societies, settlements, and dialogue.
Thanks for the reply, topology agnostic really sounded like a term to chew on. Does that mean the digitalia of your worlds exist in a seperate plane of code to the positional? Sometimes I consider digital life to be a fascinating subject, and the generative text sphere seems dead set on a huge leaps of progress. I ask because topology is among many concepts that have been taught to me via word and picture, yet I don't understand what it really means.
Any way a tech demo is neat. What is your demo out now? I'm speaking in a bit of a position of angst, as this was something I wanted to take on myself, having been wowed by SimEarth and constantly in the technical shadow of pioneers that made me want to finally give gamedev a try.
Sorry for the confusion, it's nothing that complicated ^-^
In this context, world topology is just the shape of the graph of tiles and their neighborhoods.
Basically, my algorithms work more or less the same regardless of whether tiles are hexagons with 6 neighbors each, squares with 4 neighbors, squares with 8 neighbors, an irregular voronoi graph, or something even more exotic.