I managed to get a basic path-finding algorithm loosely based on A-star implemented, yesterday. This will be the basis of some near-term testing and later-term AI for non-player entities in October Project.

Today, however, I decided I should probably test out interactions with a graphics system so I decided to poke around with LibGDX, in the hopes of creating a basic system to at least view the world in a top-down, layer-by-layer way. I managed to get up and running quickly, thanks to their tooling and initial demo, but I am having strange problems issuing the GLES2 calls, directly, from within their rendering callbacks. All the examples I have found show people intermingling GL setup calls with GDX drawing calls, but I would prefer a purely GLES2 solution (fewer things I have to understand/remember while simultaneously giving me more generalized knowledge and problems). The frustrating thing is that a simple example of it working is all I need since the problem is almost definitely me missing a state reset call I didn't realize I need to call when running under GDX. I may have to dig into their implementation to see what their helpers do, under the covers.

Aside from just getting a black screen (at least I fixed the native crash I was having), I have found that their system is well designed and I have some ideas for how to facilitate the basic UI of the first demo game.

Once I get this working, the other big items to work out are the network layer (which should be interesting), the crafting/interaction system (which should open some interesting doors), and the basic entity AI (which shouldn't be too complicated now that I am mostly happy with the path finder - although it does have a few bugs, limitations, and may require optimization).

After that, I just need to flesh out the existing ideas and weave them together into something interesting and sane.

Also, I feel like I should update the template I feed into CacophonyExporter so that it will provide a multi-page blog index, instead of just an eternally-growing single index (one page to rule them all).

Jeff.