Thursday, November 13, 2014

 

wine

The project has resurrected. I made extensive tests with the cloud and I successfully ran a tiled rendering of a large map, 256 square km, 64x64 tiles at 1024x1024 pixels each.
This is not the extension that I envisaged, since I imagined a 2048 square km map, made of 256x256 tiles.
I think this is a bit beyond the current technology, since the render I performed has a total of 4096 tiles, and it took around 20 hours to complete on a windows monster machine, but just try to imagine how long it would take to render 65536 tiles instead of 4096. For now I'll have to accept this limit. The map is vast enough anyway.
Other tests with ubuntu and wine have been successful also, this means the solution is scalable and economical due to the fact that a linux vm under amazon is much cheaper than a windows one in azure.
However, this means the map making quest is over. It took so long, the post in which I first talked about a map maker is dated June 21st. The next step is yet to be found. I have the map, but I don't have a scenario yet, so what shall the player do once he has all his tiles? he must put them somewhere, prepare the basic scenario properties, base locations, units' starting positions, treasury and income and so on.
The mere visualization of the map should not be of great difficulty, I already programmed that part, now I just have to refine it because whoever builds a scenario has to work with all the tiles, so there  must be some dynamic loading/unloading of the tiles.

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