The Chosen

A few modifications to the graphics engine to separate floor tiles from unit tiles, and also down-sizing the current units (the black circle placeholders). This running version also had some minimal graphic clipping around the edges of the screen but painted only the 250 or so visible tiles and not all 10,000 of them. Unfortunately, the modifications I made to achieve this smaller painting area were overly simple and will need to be rewritten before the graphics engine can be considered “done”. The keystroke engine on the other hand has been applied and is remarkably smooth. So far the graphics engine, mouse engine (scroll engine), and keystroke engine are all running very smoothly and still using very few CPU resources. I hope that remains true after the more complicated engines have been written, such as the pathfinding, A.I., or networking engines.

To achieve this screen I had to write an ImageStore class to handle all of the pictures. This class efficiently pre-loads and pre-renders each image before it is actually painted by the graphics engine.

Here is what this project started out as. It’s beautiful if you ask me. At this point the graphics used were simply there to demonstrate the size of the tiles and also effectively demonstrate the scrolling engine. This also gave me just what I needed to test the graphics engine as it ran at 60 FPS painting all 10,000 tiles (100×100). Yes it was very crude but it got the job done and also helped me pressure my artist to produce some simple tiles.

The first game tile. Dirt.

Oooooh. Aaaaah.

Well, the official first day of conception and collaboration was November 9th. Many ideas were introduced and debated until the first day of coding which began on December 4th. Coding started and moved slowly until a basic version of the graphics engine was proven reliable. The graphics engine was slightly upgraded and tested while progress was also made on the scroll engine. Before long a working demo with simple tiles and a scrolling interface was released on December 8th. Next, we decided on the title: “The Chosen”. We then set up this small site to showcase those and future results. This site/blog was launched on December 22, 2007.