Tile edging technology

I spent a night working on the world map and soon realized it was far to slow to manually placing down the edging tiles for the paths and oceans. Also, having to draw all the edge pieces takes ages and precious tile slots. So I went to ground for a couple of days and developed an automatically edging layer.  I can now just have a single tile for each terrain type and the sys will add the appropriate edge tiles around the edge. The result is pretty good, though its a simple overlay system and has the limitation that everything must edge with the default grasss terrain. I'm pretty confident this won't be a major limitation.

Raw Map Data

With Edging Tech

Raw Map Data

With Edging Tech

This new tech means I fill out maps very quickly, and add in new terrain types quickly. The world map is quite large,  and I'm finding I need a few terrain types to keep the regions unique and interesting.

Other new things that can be seen in todays youtube video - I've upgraded the city graphics with some cheap models from TurboSquid. There's lots of great art on that site now. I've added the new tree and grassland section as well as a snow section that can be seen in this weeks you-tube video. There is now a blizzard spell and spell casting now has a target indicator. The town lamp graphics has been revamped and there is now a signpost object that will be found all over the game giving directions as well as the occasional clue.

I'm mainly adding content now,  though there are a number of bugs I need to fix, and features like shops and the minigame framework haven't been started yet. I really don't want to release the game with large parts of it missing but then I don't want to hold it back for years, so I'll probably have to work out which features can be added after release without turning away potential buyers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tua1XzQCx8