Thursday, January 1, 2015

Game-development Log (12. Scaling up the loader process)


During the last month I've been mostly refactoring the loader process. As it was I had lots of trouble loading larger areas. I've detailed the problem (and the solution) on a previous post. I've also optimized the loading process and I'm able to load the whole world in about 1 day, already including pre-generating the lower zoom level images.

Regardless, I've haven't yet imported the whole world as everything is still work in progress. I'm planning to add some additional stuff to the map, like mountains, regions, cities and overall improved aesthetics.

I've currently imported to Azure a rectangle that goes from coordinate [15E 60N] to [15W 30N]. Basically this area:


If you zoom in inside this area the Bing Maps tiles are replaced with my own (after zoom level 7). For example, zooming in into London:


Or a random area on Norway:

Or Béchar in Algeria:

The most important thing to note is that those hexagons are not simply cosmetic. All information is being pushed to client-side so that the units will behave differently depending on the terrain. For example, a tank can only cross a river through a bridge:


I've also added:
Deserts
Two levels of forests: dense and sparse

Anyway, you can play around with it at: https://site-win.azurewebsites.net/



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