New Nations, Rumours and Maps

I've been pretty busy over the last few weeks with other responsibilities, so I've only worked on Sunlorn in little bits and pieces. I have continued to develop the chat/rumours system I discussed in my last update post. A few examples of randomly generated rumours you can hear by chatting with the town's people are:

    The wand of darkness can be found in a volcanic cave deep underground below Tirzah, guarded by a hook-clawed beast.

    The ruined city of Tonina is located about 20 kilometres southwest of Oicheghlan.

    The concealed drains on the streets of Tirzah lead to an elaborate sewer system.

I also decided to finally open up the number of playable nations (until now, only one was available). At character creation, the player can now choose the nation of origin of their character from among four options:

    Tikautlakah - A civilization loosely based of the Aztecs and other mesoamerican and south american civilizations.

    Voturan - A graeco-roman style civilization.

    Zurite - A civilization loosely based on ancient Egypt and mesopotamian civilizations.

    Treveri - A nation inspired by celtic and old norse culture.

The player character is always human. The player's nation has no impact on attributes or abilities, but does affect the kind of equipment the player will have access to in shops around the start of the game as well as religions. The player's nation will also affect how beings from other human and non-human civilizations will react to the player and the game objective that is assigned to the player at the start.

On that topic, I just added a "GoalKeeper" system that stores a list of possible game objectives and determines which one is used when a new game is started. For now, each nation just has one simple fetch-the-item kind of objective. The game objective will eventually shape the way the game world is generated. For example, if the objective is to recover a single item, the game might happen in a single, linear dungeon with maybe a couple of branches. If the objective is to gather seven orbs of something, the game might generate seven separate small dungeons that the player can do in whatever order.

The world can be fairly large and I have not included a command for the player to view an overhead map since I want navigating around the world to be part of the challenge of the game. Instead, I did just create in-game maps that you can find in shops. They are kind of expensive, but the player can still look at them inside the shop without buying. Here's an example of what one looks like:

The world is randomly generated at the start of the game. The city names are chosen at random from name lists stored in multiple text files. For now, the world is always a single island. Another thing I'd like to implement soon to aide navigation is to put signposts along the side of the highway that give the distance and direction to nearby cities.

I also recently implemented a new version of A* pathfinding for drawing roads and tunnels. Instead of finding the shortest path, this version will instead add cost any time the path changes direction to result in a path composed of long, straight segments. This, I hope, will make it a lot easier to connect buildings to the highway in places where lakes might get in the way.

Just now when I was in the shower, I had this idea for a new type of dungeon generation algorithm that will produce dungeons with rooms like interlocking puzzle pieces, so maybe I'll pump that out soon.