This week I wrapped up the absolute basics of ExVenture’s largest new feature, the overworld.
This was a huge feature that’s barely been scratched.
Map Editor
First up was I wanted to make a nice way to edit the overworld in the browser. This was my first big React app. You can see it in action below:
I have a lot of ideas on how to make this nicer, but the editor works for now. Things I want to add are: a nicer color picker, which will display the color instead of just using the word; and some way to paint bucket large areas with symbols and colors.
I may also set up a terrain swatch to bundle together a symbol and color (and eventually cell attributes) into a nice picker.
Exit Editor
After the map is created, you need to hook it up with rooms so players can move in and out of the map. This is another react page that does live API updates.
Moving Around
Once exits are created, players will be able to move around freely between the room based zones and the overworld based zones.
Here is movement on MidMUD, going from the room based town of Milay to the countryside around it:
Backing Architecture
Overworld zones are set up as a pool of Sector processes. Each sector handles a portion of the grid of cells in a map, 10x10 right now. The calling or casting process determines which sector to talk to so this should scale well.
Only minor updates for the commands were needed to get the overworld working. Mostly the updates were stripping functionality and making sure they did less on the overworld. Commands like involving items in particular were broken on the overworld, because I didn’t want to implement item storage on the overworld quite yet.
TODOs
I’ve started a GitHub issue to track all the things that are still missing. The big ones right now are:
- Items in the overworld
- NPCs in the overworld
- Say communication should go further than your current cell
- Seeing other players on the map
I am looking forward to seeing the overworld slowly fill out now that the basics of being able to get to it and move around are done. It is a huge relief to have this part over.
