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Crawle is a sandbox dungeon-crawler with a focus on realistic survival featuring mechanics such as sanity, hunger, thirst, energy and diseases.

Post news Report RSS [Development] 20/4/12 - General Rewriting.

Some more updates on biomes/chunks, a small revamp to the graphics engine, and several optimisations to the rendering. And, no, we're not dead.

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Sorry for the lack of updates. I'm lazier than Sekaru.

Chunks
So, to start, I've developed a semi-efficient rendering system for the chunks. When chunks are loaded, they're allocated into an index, from 1 to 254 (Meaning, 254 chunks can be rendering at once. Any more won't render, as it's simply my pre-caching system in place, without trying to make it slow.), and cached. When a chunk is out of view, the cache just destroys itself, and replaces itself with the new visible cache. You might think, because it's from 1 to 254, it just fills it up, until it loops over again. Nope, it allocates to whatever is the lowest one available to use. Because of the way this system works, I can have 9 chunks rendering in a 3x3 grid, and another surrounding 12 chunks that were just out of view, but still being loaded, meaning I'm only using 21 caches to render the world, and occasionally spiking to 22 when creating a new cache, and more or less instantly destroying the old one in place.

Simply put, the system is fast, and efficient. Personally playing, I get 64 FPS, which is exactly what it should be.

Biomes
Well, I've developed an interesting biome system. As promised, I was basing it off of humidity, and moisture, and I've done that, but one thing that's a bit out of my plan, but still works for huge worlds, ready to explore, is that each chunk actually has its own allocated biome, meaning the world makes large and gradual transitions between each biome, rather than a sudden 4 tiles shift. Of course, some may argue that this makes the worlds linear, but, from my view, it makes the world more geographically interesting to explore.

Graphics Engine, Rendering, and Designs
Nothing major, just a few fixes and optimisations to help run more smoothly.
I've also modified some of the rendering, so it's actually handled as a single byte, rather than multiple booleans. Oh, and, provided Sek' doesn't bug me too much not to, a redesign for the main menu may happen sometime soon! Oh, and some new music! If I get Luke's permission to, I'll post it in the comments. :>

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Sekaru here. I made dungeon themes because that guy above me seemed to have not done anything for a whole week. Blasphemic.

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That's all. Doesn't mean I'm out of hiatus. Just keeping the game alive ;].

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