That's exactly what this is. A blog. I'm running out of meaningful titles.

First, have some music:

And proceed to ignore everything else.

I guess this is kinda a blog about game development. So let's talk about Exile.

As mentioned before, I was improving it. Tweaking the magic system? Well, I've completely trashed the ideas I had, and come up with some more interesting ones after playing Hexen 2 again, and reading several books from The Dresden Files.

Anyway, first phase is to ditch the blocky levels. It was getting slow, and I didn't feel like ripping it apart and using an Octree based data structure when I could just go ahead and use a better data structure right off the bat.

I began this morning to create a sector based editor. Got as far as making a window in which you could draw sectors and join them.

Halfway through that, I decided "Screw this" (Which I often do), and remembered something: The Build engine. Several open-source ports of Build are available, and I decided that it'll be in my better interests to use the Build map format for my levels as an alternative to a custom one that does the same thing.

Creating my own similar editor will take me a few days, which isn't a problem, but right now, I feel like messing around with the game, not the toolset.

Luckily for me, good ol' Ken Silverman documented the map format perfectly, with an included "How to read these" section.

Rendering them is the only problem I'll have to face. And I've already got that sorted out. It's elementary. Each sector has 'walls'. A wall can have a property that essentially links it to an adjoining sector. This reminds me of something: Portal engines. So it's a case of finding the sector the camera is in, doing a quick raycast, and rendering any sectors hit. A ray is terminated if it hits a solid wall, but continues if it hits a linked one.

On the gameplay side of things, I want to make the magic system predominant, and potentially more complex. This came, as mentioned, after reading some of The Dresden Files, and also after playing a Runemaster character on TomeNET.

So this means some potential manual potion mixing, rune drawing and such. Perhaps. Ideas are cheap :P

But I would like to make things more potentially complex. And by that, allow players who are interested to delve into a game that's a bit deeper than 'hack, slash, swallow potion, resume battling the teddy graham army'.

Anyway, I'm outta here again. I almost completely devoured the family internet this month, so I'm only allowed to use it for a short while on Saturdays, conspicuously after 5PM, for a short while. See you all next weekend.