clayote @clayote@gamemaking.social

Released #LiSE version 0.11.

This is the first release with "keyframes," which improve performance a lot when you're starting with a big map.

Release notes: https://github.com/LogicalDash/LiSE/releases/tag/v0.11

#python #gamedev #tools

it's a good thing I didn't do a new release for the unloader because it's hell of broken! #LiSE

The part of the #LiSE data model that actually represents the world state seems to be streaming in and out of memory now. There's still some metadata about the rules engine that's loaded whole and I'll probably need to do something about that when games get *really* long. But maybe I should focus on the debugger at the moment?

Released #LiSE version 0.11.1 https://github.com/LogicalDash/LiSE/releases/tag/v0.11.1

This is a bugfix release that makes keyframes work when you make more than one before you commit.

#LiSE #python #gamedev

Released #LiSE version 0.11.

This is the first release with "keyframes," which improve performance a lot when you're starting with a big map.

Release notes: https://github.com/LogicalDash/LiSE/releases/tag/v0.11

#python #gamedev #tools

Since this is a developer tool I should focus on quality of life features for developers

In the mid term this means debugging tools that let you trace through the state of the rules and view the state of the world before and after this-or-that rule ran

In the short term, having to look at your terminal emulator to see what you're printing in those rules is real inconvenient

Although I did like the aesthetic of the Pixel City tiles:

https://opengameart.org/content/pixel-city

I'm not sure they're really appropriate for the editor view in #LiSE, because you're going to be placing pawns on top of them by dragging, and it's not hard for buildings to block the tile you want. I'm not really up to implementing SimCity2k-style camera rotation, at least at the moment.

The most usable modern #tile set I've found is from Kenney:

https://opengameart.org/content/map-pack-180-assets

Anybody got suggestions? #foak

A #LiSE feature that I plan to implement isn't for developing or playing games, but for talking about them

Telling people what happened to your fortress is a huge part of the Dwarf Fortress experience, but right now, that mostly means sharing annotated screenshots

What if you could write notes and draw diagrams atop the game while playing it, then send your save file to a friend so they could see all those and the game as you played it?

You may elect to make new keyframes at any time, which makes time travel to that particular point in time much more efficient

But the whole history of the world, and any branches in it, are still being loaded

This doesn't need to be the case; someday soon, only the most recent keyframe and changes thereafter will be loaded when you start the game

Earlier stuff can be loaded at need

Everything that ever changes in LiSE gets pushed onto a stack and added to a database transaction, where other engines would keep it in a plain variable. This enables time travel, at negligible cost to runtime performance...but turns out to require more loading than I expected

A keyframe is, conceptually, much like a traditional save file. The state of the world at time of keyframe can be loaded in very quickly

The initial state of the world is now a keyframe

I had to add the keyframe feature to #LiSE earlier than I expected, because I was making a generator for simple grid-like worlds and grids of moderate size, say 100x100, were causing load times of around thirty seconds when you resumed a previously generated world

I'm not implementing paging yet, but I'm pretty sure I'll need it before version 1.0

The next release happens when there's a pretty good workflow for generating grids and editing/running games on them