After a good couple of weeks of absence from touching anything programming-, let alone game development related (that, and surviving Vietnam), I have picked up from where I have left off.

Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. At times I was thinking of never coming back, which is a bit awkward, as I have previously applied for and have been eventually offered a conditional place on a university course (BSc in Games Development).

I have spent May being tired and fed up with the efforts that I have been making, mostly futile, as I had been looking at it. But of course that is not fair, not to mention right: it's all a learning experience, and even if it was a bit painful, it's still valuable (and probably more valuable for it).

The other day, however, I felt intrigued enough to pick up my projects, especially the one I'm going to tell you about this time:

XRTile is a static library, as the name suggests, based on XRhodes, and geared towards the development of tile-based games. This might or might not (or MIGHT NOT) sound so hot, so let me elaborate here a bit.

Follow up:

Most of XRTile's functionality relies on XRhodes' Table container (XR::Table<>). What it provides in its present state is:

• tools for procedural generation and further processing of tilemaps (randomization, fuzzing, multiplication, melting, padding, collision detection, conversion to heightmaps and so on)
• visibility testing (a modified version of Bresenham's algorithm; there's also support for wrapping maps)
• A* pathfinding (also supports wrapping maps; plug your own heuristics functions)

Some bughunt, streamlining and additional features are next, but XRTile will be out, hopefully very soon. I mean that.