cleverraven (this is galenevil right?) tweeted that there will be a halloween release.
he said the coastline probably wont be in. I am not familiar with this. what are you working on?
Targeting A release at Haloween, it might be a release candidate for 0.9 with some extra Haloween goodies we’ve been working on. Right now we’re working hard on making 0.9 the most bug-free release of DDA ever.
The coastline thing is a reference to a set of features a dev named veryinky has been working on. Right now we have an “overmap”, which you can see as the area that gets revealed when you do debug -> reveal map. Part of what veryinky has been working on is reworking how those overmaps get laid out, which includes making a continent-sized overovermap, each cell of which is an overmap. This allows the addition of large-scale structure to the map, like coastlines. More importantly it gives us a mechanism to give a very large area a personality. For example there might be a wilderness overmap with little to no normal structures, perhaps just gas stations and highway. On the other extreme there might be a city overmap that’s entirely filled with a city. In another direction, we might have ocean overmaps with islands. In between would be the kind of overmap we make now. Instead of saying “all cities are x size” or similar tweaks to mapgen, we would have an option that let you chose what kind of overmap you spawn on.
This sounds seriously awesome! A continent-sized overovermap? Count me in. Can’t wait for the 0.9 release and the subsequent Coastline feature set 
It’s amazing to see how far this game has come, and the plans for the future. Seriously, this game is freaking amazing.
is this a similiar concept to biomes?
Where do you guys discuss stuff like the overmap? I dont see it in mods/suggestions. I went to github and I saw under ‘pulls’ that there were some discussions. i dont recall this.
what big features are you targeting for .9? and where do you guys discuss this stuff?
Some happens on the forums, some happens on IRC, and some happens in the issue tracker in github.
veryinky kind of went off on his own to do the overovermap thing, which we don’t recommend, so there hasn’t been much discussion of it.
Coast to coast zombie smashing road trip.
Winbombs
sounds like the guy is doing some cool work… sometimes its good to have people just do stuff.
so is the overmap concept similiar to biomes? will this plug int z-levels. so each section in the overmap will be a section with z-levels when that is done?
Overmaps are already 3D, it’s just that we don’t load the detailed map data for z-levels the player isn’t currently on. Overovermaps would actually be 2D, because the “personality” of an overmap would be the same above and below ground level.
It seems like the map system is pretty similar to the one used by Dwarf Fortress, but that could be because it’s the most sensible option. youtoo mentioned biomes, which DF uses pretty extensively (although I can’t remember if they actually called it that). Do you pull a lot of inspiration from DF, or does it just turn out that a lot of the things end up being similar because they’re both in part ASCII Roguelikes?
I can’t speak for the parts of it that came from Whales, but it strikes me as mostly convergent evolution. If you have a map that’s too big to keep the whole thing active, the only sensible thing to do is to tile it somehow. Likewise it’s just sensible to split very large map generation into multiple layers with order-of-magnitude size differences. For the part of the map that’s currently active, we do a kind of conveyor belt thing where all the individual chunks shift by under the player, I actually don’t know how DF handles that. I only have a vague notion of how df biomes are implemented, and that vague sense doesn’t match up with my understanding of how our overovermaps are going to work.
Well, from what I remember, DF biomes are a continuous region of stone layers, dirt layers, flora, and fauna that are kind of grouped together. Lots of that doesn’t apply to what you’re doing yet as every type of zombie appears pretty much everywhere, except for some of the special types that spawn near map landmarks (like fungal towers for fungal zombies, etc) unless you’re planning on implementing some major changes in map generation. I think this is what you were getting at earlier with area “personalities,” like an empty region with just highways and gas stations to smaller towns, to larger cities.
I really like the direction the game is going, and I can’t wait for the release tomorrow!
DF handles it slightly different then us, because their “smallest” map chunks are significantly bigger (each one is about 48x48 IIRC, instead of like 16x16). Basically they just load up the 6x6ish chunk of “smallest” chunks and drop/reload them in memory, but I’m fairly certain that rather then doing a conveyor-belt style thing like we do they rather actually move the player around on the maps, only shifting them when they drop/reload sub maps. Biomes function fairly similarly, but DF biomes are separate on a z-level basis as well (it’s just that the underground ones are hidden on the map) thus allowing them to have varying biomes as you descend (technically there are only 5 underground biomes at the moment in DF, Cavern 1, 2, 3, Lava, and Hell).
This sounds really cool. I would love to see a coastline ingame, and people have been asking about that since back in the whales days. This game just keeps getting better.
boats confirmed
Looking worward to this! Keep going, this release is gonna be awesome!
boats confirmed[/quote]
Boats?!?! Your expected to swim oceans hoping that the great tentacles don’t notice you or certain unpleasant things worse that death will happen, not just build a boat and sail across.
Please keep in mind that pretty much everything discussed in this thread are things that are NOT going to be in the upcoming 0.9 release. We have an absurdly large amount of new features and content though, and we’re working hard right now on making it the most bug-free release yet.
so what are the major features in .9? its hard to tell from the commits.
Boats would be super nice though. I spent like 30 minutes the other day seeing if any vehicle would not sink if I drove it into the water.