New Map Generator Progress and Future Plans

Randomly Generated Road Network

I am still working on the new City Map Generator. I am done with the basics and i have a working map where I can move around, but NPCs and factions have been temporarily disabled as I need to review their respective AI. I had to rewrite the zone editor, and it's only temporary as it will be replaced by a building editor that will allow to set multiple levels, select specific walls/floor types and other features. Here are a few work-in-progress screenshots and comments to give you a hint about what's going on:

Abstract Map, building size is randomized.

Central roads are now 5 square wide and are more detailed

City's outer ring, high frequency of large buildings

Crossroad in the inner city

The same crossroad

This is the basic map generator. Maybe not in next release, but soon, I will add randomly generated features. N/S or E/W roads may be double with a row of buildings between them. Corners and cross roads may get a central park or building, and so on. Also 2x2 square of small L-shaped buildings may be arranged to have a central plaza or park.

The system I am using is relatively simple (the executable size is smaller than in last release and uses a bit less RAM), yet it's fairly powerful, and gives me way more power in terms of design. There's a few downsides, as you may not like having less roads and so tightly spaced buildings, but the pros outweigh the cons tenfold in my opinion. Also, having a simple road layout will help a lot when cars will be introduced. 

Anyway, I hope to release a work in progress next week-end. It will probably be buggy, but, hey, you are dealing with an alpha version anyway. The two next weeks will be used to work on introducing the new building system (several floors) granted I can teach my pathfinder to deal with it (damn, I will never bitch against poor pathfinding in complex games in my life again) and theoretically we should more or less be ready for the missions and news frameworks. On that matter, here is a quick and very inaccurate roadmap:

• v0.5 - Fully functional city generator 
• v0.6 - Mission & News systems framework
• v0.7 - AI improvements, new jobs, buildings , missions, and stuff to fill the mission framework
• v0.8 - Cars (yeah a whole step "only" for cars)
• v0.9 - Beta Version - game balancing, GUI and AI finalization
• v1.0 - Official Release - All (ahem) remaining bugs fixed.
• v1.x - New weapons, missions, bug fixes and ideas from the community.

I have no precise ETA but I hope to reach 1.0 before or during December as I'd really like to move toward my next projects (no point in asking, It's a very bad idea to publish unreleased ideas on the Internet) asap. It's not that I don't like GRA, but this game is more a "tech demo" of the engine I am writing than a real game. It can deal with way more complex / larger things than that.