Weekly update: Zircon & Caves of Zircon

This week was pretty exciting!

For Caves of Zircon:

• there is now hunger and equipment so the player can actually die of starvation and equip items. These items also have combat stats so they increase effectiveness.
• Food can be picked up from corpses (mushrooms from fungi and bat meat from bats) and eaten

• Zombies were also added and there was a fun bug with them here. They tried to path to the player when the player become visible for them and the algorithm was bugged and returned the tile where the zombie were as the first tile to go to. So the zombie tried to enter the tile where it already was and found a zombie there (big surprise!). Default action when it bumps into an entity is Attack so zombies were literally beating themselves to death when they saw the player! This was my most fun bug this year!

  For Zircon:

• /u/Ender_L finished with the preliminary implementation of a LibGDX renderer for Zircon. These screenshots are using the LibGDX renderer. Basic functionality is working, but it is not yet ready for production use (some things like Modifiers and Animations are not added yet). This also means that with LibGDX you’ll be able to use Zircon from the browser!

  What’s nice is that to get this working you’ll only need to switch the swing Maven dependency to the libgdx one and change this

val tileGrid = SwingApplications.startTileGrid(AppConfigs.newConfig()
        .withDefaultTileset(tileset)
        .withSize(Sizes.create(60, 30))
        .build())

to this:

val tileGrid = LibgdxApplications.startTileGrid(AppConfigs.newConfig()
        .withDefaultTileset(tileset)
        .withSize(Sizes.create(60, 30))
        .build())

Apart from this there were some other improvements to Zircon, like:

• EllipseFactory: now you can draw ellipsis Shapes as well, not just lines, rectangles and triangles.
• Input handling was upgraded, now you can listen for specific characters and InputTypes
• Layers are now Clearable
• There are now only 7 tasks left for the Christmas release!