The next build I release publically is going to have objects on the planets, varying planet sizes, alien life, weaponry, and very rarely ruins with alien artifacts in them, which may be sold at space stations that will spawn in deep space for money. The money will be worthless at the time of that release, but at least the whole thing will have a "point".

I estimate all of that will be a few weeks from now. Maybe less. I have a vacation coming up this week but you know...Quakecon.

EDIT: Ok, perhaps a bit sooner than that...

It's funny. I didn't tell my artist what I added, I just told him it was a surprise update and to go check out the planets. Well the aliens spawn out of the damn trees, and he's been working in a barren universe for a while, so he pretty much wet his pants when the first one attacked him.

"Hey what's that red bar on the UI?" "I dunno must be a bug or something."

What you are looking at is simply the ground texture layer. There will be an object detail layer on top of it filled with rocks and trees and stuff. I was trying to figure out a way to do that layer without resorting to a tilemap, array, or perlin noise, and I think I've come up with something. I'm off work today and that is actually what is next on the list.

The reason I avoided those three things was because they would contribute to that "randomly generated look" mentioned earlier in the thread.

There is actually no bumpmapping yet, but there will be, and the direction and strength of the lighting will be dependent on orbital position.

My custom plugin handles the generation of the universe, and I link Construct to it using a series of expressions.

Well, my artist is a fan of realism, and I originally had stars everywhere, so we tuned it back a bit. Just keep in mind that that's a number somewhere in the code that I can tweak in about six seconds, but you probably will be satisfied with this star density once the game comes out. Most of our game is actually going to occur within your ship as it is flying through space. Also, those empty sectors are going to be filled with anomalies.

The seed of the universe you are all playing in is 1337. If I change that to 1338, you will be playing in a totally different universe. When the game is released, the seed will change at random behind the scenes every time you start a new game.

I've had this little pet project for a long time. It started out a long time ago as a text based console program. It generates an entire universe from a number. The only thing that is stored is the number, everything else is generated on the fly. Without the constraints of RAM or hard drive space, the universe is effectively infinite. There isn't too much to do yet, but I wanted to show a little demonstration of its current state to show off the capabilities of Construct. I am honestly quite impressed that it hasn't died yet under this kind of strain.

I have to release this in EXE form, not CAP, as I use special custom plugins. All the information you need to explore the universe is in the readme file included in the zip.

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 3797781698

EDIT: Blegh, I forgot to add to the readme one of the keys. On a planetary surface, if you hold the right mouse button, your view will zoom out to map mode to see my perlin noise at work a bit better.

Construct has no limits, it is extensible, so you can develop plugins for anything you need.

Been working on the Universe Generator. I've gotten to planets. I have a large canvas object, and I am attempting to use it as a mask to blend two other textures together. (It's a heightmap, trying to blend together two tiled textures of rock and grass.) Unfortunately the mask effect only works with alpha, and canvas does not export alpha.

The heightmap is black and white. I was wondering if someone could whip up an effect that would utilize brightness/grayscale images to mask instead of the alpha channel. That would be awesome.

OR if there is another way to do this, I'd love to hear that as well.

I dropped most of my development on Crooked because Python wasn't working at the time. If it was working, I'd probably pick it back up. Although, now that I know how to write a plugin, I could do most of my programmatic stuff in a plugin.

My point is that people don't use Python because they aren't interested in using Python. They don't use it because it's broken, or because they believe it is broken. It's kind of a gray area.

I guess it's completed, I haven't received any complaints about it. Feel free to move it wherever you like.

I saw someone in Construct's chat talking about Unity 3D, and went to go check that out, and am now happily addicted to everything about it. I've already implemented several very important features of my space game in it including crafting, inventory, space movement in 3D, and power management - you can run wires around the ship to power each component of it. Unity even makes multiplayer of all things a simple affair. It is the perfect combination of a 3D Map Editor AND the actual power of real code (either JavaScript or C#). It has an large and active community due to the current iPhone game rush. It is quite simply the closest equivalent to Construct that there is in three dimensions, and I love it. It's like Construct and Ogre had a love child.

That said, I will probably still do a dungeon plugin for Construct at some point, because I said I would, but it'll be on a slower timescale since I can only do so much. We're getting hammered at work cause of the upcoming holidays and I am spending most of my off-time splooging over Unity, because it is that awesome.

If development on the plugin becomes so problematic that it starts taking a very long time, there is a premade library designed for roguelike games that I can quickly port into Construct for you guys, but first I would like to try and finish the algorithm I'm already working on. Meanwhile, yeah you guys can move this thread to the release forum, and I can mirror the plugin somewhere else if you want.

So I take it your GTA style thief game is still on the table, then?

Possibly in the future. I am enthralled with the concept of a thievery game, since so few exist and I enjoy thieving stuff in any game that allows me to.

What I have on my plate right now is much more ambitious than that. In fact, I'm not even sure what the gameplay will be like quite yet, I just know how big it will be.

16,602,069,658,607,655,322,500,000,000. Yes, that is the area of what I am planning. That is sixteen octillion, six hundred and two septillion, sixty nine sextillion, six hundred fifty eight quintillion, six hundred and seven quadrillion, six hundred fifty five trillion, three hundred twenty two billion, five hundred million pixels on one layout. It's completely seamless - Construct doesn't break. Each sector is 30,000x30,000 pixels, and there are 18,446,744,065,119,617,025 sectors in the game. Going to any of them does not require a load, and there is no boundary of any kind. You just fly around in that space, and I have rigged Construct to understand how to interpret everything persistently. The sectors are simply there to identify where you are, they do not instance any area of space in any way. The crazy part is that this isn't the entire gameplay area, just one layout, the space layout. There are planets that are sized *to scale*, so you could spend an entire game on one planet if you choose, and you might have to if you crash land on one.

All of my sectors are procedurally generated down to the last detail. They are given names, histories, FUTURES (yes, I generate a procedural timeline for every point in time, for every area of space). They are then populated with planets and anomalies, and even ships at this point. Ships that belong to empires that span hundreds and thousands of stars...empires that are at war with each other. The empires themselves are randomly generated, so one could be a monarchy of three eyed aliens, while another could be a democratic kind of one eyed alien species that prefer trade over war. Currently you can land on these planets and walk around, though you will see a transition between each tile on a planet (a zelda style transition between each point on a perlin map).

However, my planets are currently empty, and that's why this plugin is the next logical step. So yes, my current project is quite a bit more ambitious than a mere city. See my problem was always that I could code, but not well enough to do a full game. Once I discovered the plugin SDK and how to use it, I learned that I *can* code well enough to push out a plugin to make Construct do what I need it to do. Then Construct can handle all the dicey problems like collision, graphics, sound, and so forth. I also found a source of art for my game recently, which means I can replace all the stuff I found randomly on google images! So as soon as I hook everything together well enough to take some footage of it, I will release some information.

imagine a randomized town, for example.

This is a component of my game, and I was wondering whether or not to integrate it into this plugin. I think that functionality isn't specialized enough to make it in, and yet town generation is SO SIMILAR to dungeon generation that it'd be a waste not to. Essentially, a city is just an inverted dungeon with no doors...just rooms with walls between them - except the walls are roads and the rooms are city blocks.

My plan was just to have the dungeon object place sprites, and leave the behavior of said sprites up to the designer, so theoretically this could be possible by just not adding any objects into the door category, and making your rooms solid and your walls walkable rather than the inverse.

Well, there's been no complaints in the Perlin Noise thread, so I assume either nobody's using it or it's a resounding success. Either way, it is a small component of my game. The next component is randomly generated interior structures, which I will tentatively call "dungeons", because words like "structure" and "building" are not quite accurate.

Basically, this plugin is going to take a lot of square sprites, and let you categorize them into "walls" "floors" and "doors". You can then add decoration sprites to those three categories that will be randomly sprinkled onto the map as well. You give the dungeon a seed at that point and it will assemble the map for you. I plan on having it support cellular autonoma for natural areas like caves, as well as man made structures with clearly defined rooms and halls. The size will also be adjustable.

It's a work in progress right now. I have the generators working, but I'm working on getting the plugin features just right. I'd like it to be a visual thing that you can see directly inside the editor, if possible. It is clearly not anywhere near ready for release, but there is potential here, and I opened this thread for some ideas on things I could add to the plugin to make it more user friendly.

Shoot!