It all just so painfully painfully awesome!
Me wanty very much!
Cheers,
Kev
Just downloaded it to try it out. First thoughts, I’m digging all the art. Second thoughts, “Oh, I can only use the map editor”. Third Thoughts, “Umm… It crashes whenever I get to the loading map screen.”
Try launching via console with -Xmx2g or -Xmx4g 
There’s a resource overloading problem on load I need to resolve still, some machines can’t handle the huge sudden spike in memory usage.
Original Article on RPC’s Website
After some careful thought over the last week about the final maximum size of the RPC map engine, I’ve finally settled on 512x512. While the engine can actually support up to 2048x2048 before it starts having problems (on a good machine) 512x512 seems to be a nice, reasonably number that most all platforms should be able to support with minimal issues, and it’s still huge anyway! 512x512 maps are large enough that you still have a ton of space to move around in. Anything above that like my 1024x1024 test map in the 7-10-2014 build, are simply overkill anyway. Since the game is designed to keep the player bottled up in a small area of the map trying to defend themselves, in a typical game I would expect a player to set up his village in a small location on the map not more than 128x128. So, even the 512x512 maps are huge, offering many spots on the map to setup and it really won’t have much effect on the end gameplay for you guys.
Of course, since I didn’t want to lose my old test map, I decided to write a script to convert it from one large 1024x1024 map into 4 512x512 maps, so here’s the results!
(Note: These maps are still not final products)
Have you considered one of those “chunk systems” where only the region around the player is loaded? Or does the game mandate that everything is going all the time?
Even if everything needs to be in simulation at once, distant areas might not need all the information loaded, e.g. only the collision and entity layers.
If you ever want to go back to the large® maps you might look into it.
Looking good though!
I considered using chunking. But there’s so much data the needs to be loaded map-wide at all times I think in the big picture it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. The map itself has to run similar to that of a RTS, where basically all the non-rendering related data is needed at all times anyway to keep everything accurate. 
Another big reason (and the main one, honestly) was simply that 1024x1024 is huge, unrealistically huge. There’s no practical reason why a player would ever need a map that large. So from a development standpoint this also allows me (and users) to crank out maps a lot faster, since they’re a 1/4th of the size. Since this allows me to basically make 4 times as many maps at 1/4th the size, and since you would probably only play in a smaller 128x128 area anyway, the amount of content and the end user experience is pretty much the same anyway. 
Thanks for the pennies you toss in my general direction!
No problem. Just my fun way to support JGO.
New release: 7-17-2014!
Download latest build here!
Included in this release:
- Huge memory improvements, can run with -Xmx96M (yes, M!)
- Added Mana Crystals
- 512x512 maps instead of 1024x1024 (Reasoning explained here)
http://retropixelcastles.com/public/style_images/master/screenShots/InDev-2014-07-17-2-thumb.png
http://retropixelcastles.com/public/style_images/master/screenShots/InDev-2014-07-17-8-thumb.png
http://retropixelcastles.com/public/style_images/master/screenShots/InDev-2014-07-17-9-thumb.png
Finally getting some fun playstate stuff done! Have some basic framework for resource gathering, also pathfinding and entities are back.
2 Questions:
How do you draw the Shadows (from the Clouds)? Looks really great.
Will you stream today? 
They’re just little puffy cloud PNGs… nothing fancy at all 
http://sixtygig.com/junk/cloud2.png
…and yeah, I’ll probably stream sometime today.
Downloaded and made a quick map. I have not read this entire thread (just the first page) so forgive me if I retread something.
Likes
- Easy to use, mostly intuitive map creation controls
- Tiles seamlessly rearranging themselves as I paint landscape
- Painting felt very “natural”
Suggestions
- When starting fresh (no settings.properties) the display is initialized to a reasonably sized window, however the splash screen and main menu UI don’t fit. This is on a laptop with a 1366x768 screen. I’d suggest either picking a known good dimension, or getting the graphics to scale.
- Borders between certain tiles are enforced. i.e. green grass must border sand, which changed when I tried to put yellow grass next to my desert. It would be nice if it could be more flexible. Rocks in water for instance.
Looking great so far, looking forward to trying the actual gameplay!
Thanks for the suggestions
The starting fresh thing is a known issue, right now when you first-time launch the game it picks a resolution that’s just slightly smaller than your native resolution, the game is actually designed to run with a minimum resolution of 1280x720 (so you’re good there!) it just has the silly side effect that if you happen to be at the lower end of the minimum it tries to resize your screen lower than it should. I need to add a failsafe that won’t let it go any smaller than 1280x720.
As for the borders – Sadly, the way the engine works, I can’t have multiple layers of overlapping tiles without a huge amount of code rework and a hit to the ease-of-use feel. The original version of the tile engine actually did allow it, but it was very cumbersome to use. You had to select layers you wanted to draw on, on top of what you wanted to draw, and if you wanted to erase you had to manually select each layer one by one (or all of them at once). It was very tedious for the non-experienced mappers. The only other alternative is to draw transitions from every tile -> every other tile, and that would be borderline crazy since I plan to have hundreds of textures someday.
Guess it’s the drawback to trying to make a very lightweight-feeling, but powerful map editor. Some features that would be very wonderful to have simply just won’t work correctly. I modeled the map editor after the old Blizzard map editors for Starcraft and Warcraft, I was trying to capture that simple “pickup and go feel”, but the huge sacrifice to that feeling (Starcraft/Warcraft have it too, sadly) is not being able to overlap any terrains other than the base layer and the layer on top. 
also: Welcome to JGO!
[quote]Sadly, the way the engine works, I can’t have multiple layers of overlapping tiles without a huge amount of code rework and a hit to the ease-of-use feel
[/quote]
I suspected this was probably the response I don’t think it’s a big issue, just wanted to mention it.
[quote]also: Welcome to JGO
[/quote]
Thanks!
Woot! I’ll be sure to vote.
I’ve been spending the past few days working on a quick, smart(ish?) system for assigning your villagers to work in the various buildings on the map. In the last update I got the villagers to find assigned work and move over to the location and collect resources. But now I am taking it to the next step, assigning workers to specific buildings, and only allowing workers to work in areas with in a reasonable walking distance.
The black dots in these two shots represent the range a building has. Unlike most games, in Retro-Pixel Castles the range takes into account the actual walking distance from the main building, that way your villagers don’t go wandering off on a grand adventure around a mountain to work. They will only work in areas they can reasonable reach from the building. The range is also adjustable by the player, if a player wants to restrict the work area to keep their villagers closer and safer with shorter trips they can pull back the range. If they want to take more risks and potential hits to productivity speed they can crank the range all the way up and grab resources normally out of reach. I have a lot of plans for building workload management, unlike the standard “Send the worker, collect resource, bring resource back” mechanics you see commonly RPC will have a slightly more complicated system, that will be mostly automated anyway. But I’ll share those details when I get to them! In the mean time, enjoy these two rough shots of the buildings, workers and the building-range markers.
Shot one just shows a bunch of villagers working within range of their Lumber Mill, where as shot two shows the range, by actual walking distance and how in situations like this example your villager wouldn’t attempt to walk all the way around the tree wall and collect resources on the other end.
(Note: Early shots of the GUI, not a final polished product)
http://retropixelcastles.com/public/style_images/master/screenShots/InDev-2014-07-22-2-thumb.png
http://retropixelcastles.com/public/style_images/master/screenShots/InDev-2014-07-22-3-thumb.png
I dont know how your map works, but have you considert a ‘layerd-tile’? It would be a simple tile which renders n tiles stacked on top of each other but for the engine it looks like a simple one. This way you could create the feeling of multiply layers very easy.
Great work.
ClaasJG
Been working my butt off on resource gathering, making great progress. It’s pretty much done at this point, just working out some AI kinks.
I’ve also added randomized villagers, now they’re assigned a random skin and hair color, and their clothing color is assigned based on their “job”. Really makes the place look more lively
Weeee!!! Tie-dye villagers!!
