So, Ferret kindly gave my Dark Souls a couple of nights ago (Thanks Ferret :3), and it finished downloading this morning. Playing it offline, since I want to get used to the game on my own without a bunch of phantoms scaring the living crap outta me :P

Maybe on Saturday some of us can gear up for a game?

Anyway, my first 30 minutes with the game was spent… not dying, but wishing that Games For Windows LIVE would die. In nuclear fire. Preferably now instead of in July.

So after being forced at knife-point to register for an XBox Live account, in Internet Explorer no less, I finally got… a mandatory (And rude) update screen.

Another ten minutes in and I clicked past a few annoying messages (Missing a crucial one, it turns out), and finally got into the game.

Starting the game

No pictures, because I didn't think of taking any. Didn't matter anyway, for reasons you'll see later. :P

I made a Warrior character to start with, took the Divine Blessing, Average build.

One in-game, I started running around and progressed through the tutorial area pretty quickly. Until I hit the courtyard area where the first boss first appears.

Let's put it this way: I got crushed no fewer than five times before I noticed the tiny door in the shadows to the left.

Moving on…

Rest of the level went fairly easily. Got to what I assume is the 'last' area of the tutorial level, and saw the final help text on the ground. Something about falling and attacking. OK.

Walk through white shiney portal. Am on ledge. "Oh hi boss!"

Completely missed him on the way down and took half a second to recover. In which time I was beaten to a pulp. :P

So yeah. I died a total of seven times in the tutorial level, then decided to take a break.

Only one little problem…

One of the GFWL messages I'd dismissed was about how I was supposed to restart the game after the update before I would be allowed to sign in. So I was playing in Offline mode. Which meant: No savegames. :<

So now I have to do the tutorial area again; not that I'm complaining. I want to reconsider the build I started with anyway, and do better this time.

I'm all for a Dark Souls gaming night, by the way. :P

Pics of some of my adventure:

Exile stuff

May's well post a little update here.

I finally added in a header to the map format, and added in a thing I call a Tile Table. This basically allows tiles to be referenced by name instead of a fixed ID; an index list is built up on load and this is used to draw the tiles in the render code.

The reason I did this was because of an annoying little 'feature' that's been in existence since Exile 1.0. Maps reference textures using a numeric index, and this index is defined by the order the texture is loaded in the asset list.

This system completely decouples the map from the load-order, and means I can organize my asset file however I like.

Ran into an amusing bug that tends to happen when you're working with make. That is, it sometimes doesn't know that it should recompile a file when you've modified it.

So I spent most of my day yesterday touching my files. Heheh.

Also had to add a simple loading screen, since the game startup time is around 4 seconds, and I was getting tired of seeing a blank white screen. :P