Though I have it working on my own Ubuntu 9 machine, I haven’t the faintest idea whether the client will run on other Linux boxen. At the very least, you’ll probably need to have the wxWidgets 2.8 libraries installed to run the client on Linux. I suppose at some point I’ll figure out how to build installer packages.

Version 0.14 of the client for Linux is now available for download. Hopefully there’s someone who can try it and let me know the result. In this case, it’ll probably be “I had to add libraries X and Y and Z before it would run”. Then again, since wxWidgets is so widely used on Linux (VLC, Audacity, etc), chances are good that most people will already have the necessary pieces installed.

Though I have it working on my own machine, I haven’t the faintest idea whether the client will run on other Macs.  I’ve created an application bundle and compiled it in a way that it should supposedly run on OSX 10.5 and 10.6, but I only have 10.6, so no idea whether it will work.  And, since my machine is set up as a developer machine I have no idea whether a “normal” user’s machine will have all the libraries it needs.  That’s the trouble with being a Mac “noob”.

Version 0.14 of the client for Mac is now available for download.  Hopefully there’s someone who can try it and let me know the result.

You’ll probably notice that there hasn’t been much development on Basternae in the past month or so.  I’m spending the vast majority of time working on software for Zeta Centauri, so until that is a definite success or failure (I think June 2010 will be when I know), B3 will be fairly low-priority.  I doubt work will stop, but time available will be at a minimum.

The surface map I showed yesterday is just an enlarged 120 x 50 bitmap.  I only used 9 colors when creating it — one for each terrain type.  There is no accompanying ASCII text file.

It’s entirely possible with a lot of grunting and swearing that I could convert it into an ASCII file which I could then import into that old C program.  Why bother?  There has to be a better way.  Turns out there is.

Last night I created a small application that does one thing and only one thing — generates maps for Basternae.

Here’s how it works:

1. Load in a bitmap of any size.
2. Select a menu item and the program analyzes the bitmap and generates a list of all the different colors used in it.
3. Use that list to generate a room template for each color — title, description, and terrain type.
4. Let the user edit the list of templates so you can say light green is “The Forest of Evil” and dark green is “Drachenwald Forest”.
5. Select another menu item to have the program use the template file as it goes through the image pixel by pixel and generates a room for each pixel.

The obligatory screenshot:

I’m a bit surprised that it only took a couple hours to write.  It’s the sort of thing that the serialization, bitmap, list, and datagrid classes built into .NET make very easy to do.

It is missing one major thing — it doesn’t connect the rooms together via exits yet.  That will be easy enough to add (probably about an hour to do).  It does, however, generate a zone that loads into the editor and can be tweaked and refined further.

There’s also one neat thing about the design — the room templates can be saved off to a file and loaded again, so you don’t have to edit it all in one sitting, risk losing your work if the power goes out, and can use the same room definitions with different image variations (provided you used the same colors).

1. Has to be fairly small. No epic 90,000-room maps that take half an hour to get to the next zone.
2. Has to have both raidable and non-raidable sections. The raidable sections should be easy to get to for both sides. The non-raidable sections should be more-or-less “safe”.
3. Should be contiguous — no randomly-spaced islands, be they large or small.

In short — I want it to be small enough that the world doesn’t feel empty when there are only a few people on, but large enough to have room a good number of zones, and for people to chase each other around a bit.  If there is an error to be made in sizing I’d prefer to err on the side of too small.

Here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s subject to modification, of course, but it captures the general idea:

It will be a while before it’s in the game, so it may evolve. There will also be cavern (underdark) map at some point.

Next, I’ve added what appears to be working support for aliases.  They’re created accessed using the “#alias” command (#al for short).  They cannot yet be saved/loaded, but they do stay in memory as long as the client is open.  Saving/loading is probably the next thing I’ll work on.

Here’s an example:

You can download it here.

Yurgoth’s Estate by Sarlac
The Defense of Longhollow by Drevarr and Ilshad

For now they’ve been attached where the Gypsy Encampment meets the Kobold pond.  Things will of course move when we get world maps in place.