Where’s Kero Fin

Recently a player was having trouble sending exploration missions to Kero Fin.

We tried to make this a fairly easy hit target. (After all, an omen tells you to visit.) Probably the easiest thing is to tap or click the label, but the picture shows the extent of the map zone (with debug shading turned on).

King of Dragon Pass Map

The upcoming Six Ages game will have a map much like King of Dragon Pass. A blog post describes how the map works.

King of Dragon Pass News

Another King of Dragon Pass update is working its way through the App Store servers, and should be available by the time you read this!

iPhone News Background

This version is largely focused on user experience. We revisited a decision made in 1997, and removed the ability to tap a slider’s maximum value. In most situations, this isn’t useful, and it was too easy to miss on the small screen. To make up for it, you can just keep your finger down on the + button (or if you overshoot, the – button).

For VoiceOver users, we’re taking advantage of better iOS 6 support, and focus on a more appropriate element in many cases. And since many of you have asked for it, an advisor’s gender is now mentioned.

Cartographer Colin Driver created a larger version of the Lore map, which is now full screen on iPad, and Retina quality.

As usual in an update, we made a few improvements to advice, fixed bugs and typos, and clarified some text.

Since we’re now taking advantage of iOS 6 features, Apple’s Xcode pretty much forces us to make the minimum operating system we support iOS 4.3. If you’re playing on an older iPod touch or iPhone 3, you should not update (if you’re even given the option).

We also added a new interactive scene.

Which is always fun to do, so we’re currently planning on adding a lot in an update next year. It’s unclear if all of them will turn out to work, but we have solid ideas for over 25 scenes.

Speaking of Colin Driver, he also did many of the maps in the Guide to Glorantha which will come out next year, giving incredible detail not only on Dragon Pass, but the entire mythic world that King of Dragon Pass is set in. There are less than 3 days left, but you can still back this project on Kickstarter and perhaps get more Gloranthan secrets in print!

Finally, GOG.com currently has the Windows version of the game on sale for half price.

The Tribe Map

This screen shot from today’s build tells a lot.

It’s a Big Game
We put a lot of effort into making things feel right. When you’re making a tribe, chances are you’ll want to see where they are. So we had special code to show the current map, rather than a static picture. Similar code is now in the iOS version. (It renders the map into an image, and uses that like any other picture.)

There are other places where we did something just for one scene. Of course we tried to generalize (programmer Shawn Steele was particularly good at this), but if it was important enough (i.e. it supported the story), we did it. The Kallyr storyline needed at least three custom features (for example, she’s the only person who can appear on the clan ring as a teenager).

Better in iOS
Obviously the screen’s smaller, but I’m trying to make things better than the original. This screen shows the new anti-aliased font. Less obvious may be the tribal boundaries.

Originally, we had separate Mac and Windows code to draw this. The Mac code was much simpler, because it used QuickDraw regions. On Windows, we had to manually set each white pixel. iOS doesn’t have QuickDraw, so I used the pixel-drawing code pretty much unchanged. But the pixels no longer need to be white — they’re now drawn with alpha, and are translucent. This means you can see that the river forms a natural boundary — it shows through.

The Same
I hope it also helps allay people’s fears that the game is being changed to fit the smaller device. There are obviously some changes, but playing through the tribe-making sequence today certainly felt the same to me.

Map

Like many games, King of Dragon Pass has a map that’s gradually revealed as you explore. Since your ancestors originally lived in Dragon Pass, you have a rough idea of what’s there. The modern map is superimposed atop the historic one. For simplicity, the map is divided into hexagons, and an entire hex is either known (explored) or unknown (historic memory).

Drawing the map was fairly different for the Mac and Windows versions, and pretty much none of the old code that drew hexes could be used. So until now, I’d just been using the historic map as a placeholder.

I’ve now implemented the hex drawing. The game no longer draws individual pixels — even the iPhone has a graphics accelerator. Instead, it creates a mask, and lets the graphics system draw.

Performance seems adequate on an iPod touch, but I plan to come back and optimize if I can (iOS has some excellent performance analysis tools).

One thing that got dropped in the original version was zooming of the map. (I think it may have been partially implemented for Mac only.) But zooming is basically free in iOS. So here’s how much of the entire map you know at the start of the game. Note the scale changes as you pinch-zoom. (You can also double-tap to zoom in or out.)