Client graphical interface

At long last, development has arrived at the point where the next step seemed to be to start creating a graphical interface for the client. More concretely, the world is now rendered from a third person perspective, in a bitmapped/aliased style.

Currently, each entity type is shown with a distinct sprite, and their position above or below the camera’s plane with a continuous or stippled line. The entity’s unique ID is shown to the left of its sprite, and the distance to the camera to its right. Some basic movement options like jumping to an entity or following it were also implemented. For now, all of these controls are wired up to both the keyboard & mouse, and a generic gamepad.

A lot of these changes happened on the modded side of the code, so you can easily inspect or change a lot of what drives this functionality. For example, to use a different font, if you have a “.bdf” file for it, all you have to do is to use the “bdf2tga” option on the command line to convert it to a spritesheet in “.tga”, and to load the font from there instead, changing the specified width and height of the glyph if necessary.

You can fill a world with entities now using the “>generate <seed>” command, which will generate the world corresponding to that seed each time, deterministically.

Have fun hacking!