Weekly update: Zircon

This week:

• We worked on the component wrapper refactor. This lead to a lot of fun stuff like enabling all components to have arbitrary decorations. Currently Panel, Label, CheckBox and Header have this new functionality, and the rest will be refactored next week. Here are some Labels with unnecessarily over the top decorations.
• There are also some new examples showing off the decoration options for components. Here is the Panel example.
• We were playing with the idea of having simple and lightweight animations on Tiles. We already have Animations which work for TileGraphics objects but they are resource-intensive. So we played around with the idea of having stochastic processes generate such animations. This is a proof of concept of random bubbly lava and this one is a fleshed out example which uses a Markov Chain to simulate two different branches: “bubbly lava” (yellow exploding stuff) and “heated lava” (which you see in the rest of the gif). This turned out to be a very effective and resource-friendly way to do extensive animations and the only drawback of this method is that Tiles are animated individually: you can’t have complex multi-tile stuff with this method. Nevertheless we’re kind of OK with this solution so you can expect to see some more of these animations to arrive in the upcoming Sharing Saturdays! Feedback is also welcome!
• We have also started to work on a game concept with some of my friends (not-yet part of Hexworks) dubbed Project Forlorn. This will be a story-driven adventure roguelike game with emphasis on exploration. We already have some documents detailing the backstory and some of the game mechanics. We can’t really say much about it right now because we want you to explore it for yourself once the first version is released.

A next major release is coming up for this Autumn, so stay tuned.