February 2015 - May 2016, Big Update Dump

It's been a ridiculously long time since I last posted here. More than a year. And while it's been an eventful year, I haven't really done that much art-wise. I've done a handful of paintings, I've gotten into doing RedditGetsDrawn portraits, and I've done some doodles, but overall my time has been devoured by /r/ArtFundamentals, which since the time of my last post has evolved into a proper website, drawabox.com. It eats up a lot of my time, but I've been able to monetize it reasonably well, with both ad revenue and a patreon campaign.

Before I get into all of it, I'm gonna warn you - this is a really, REALLY long post and if you want to get to the art, jump all the way to the end.

AoA Map Viewer - 20120908

Been working on this for a bit every evening this past week, and a lot today. Features that have been added include:

• Selecting tiles (can be rendered as a filled chunk or a line drawn between the centres of the tiles)
• Autofilling selections (when your selection isolates unselected tiles, they will automatically become selected if this setting is on)
• Highlighting large regions on mouseover
• Opening maps for individual cells; opening district maps doesn't work entirely just yet
• These maps contain a rough depiction of the coastline, with seas filled in

There's still some glitchiness in some areas, but I'll iron that out soon enough. Tomorrow I guess I'll tackle stuff like getting the district maps working, and pushing the quality of those maps further. Right now they look pretty crappy.

Unfortunately, the more recent version is not playing nice with blogger, so you'll have to check it out here if you're interested: http://ambidextrous-designs.net/ageofavarice/mapviewer2/. This will not work in older browsers like IE8.

If you want to check out the javascript behind it, it's right here: http://ambidextrous-designs.net/ageofavarice/mapviewer2/js/mapviewer.js

AoA Map Viewer - 20120901

This past week I decided to jump onto AoA again, continuing where I left off - the painful Map viewer. I jumped over a hurtle that had been paining me in my last attempts to move forward with this project, and now that I have a long weekend (labour day!), I'm plenty enthused to move forward.

For now, I just want to see if I can embed the viewer within the blog for show-off purposes. The viewer itself is in some pretty rudimentary stages, but a lot of the foundations are in place. The viewer takes in different 'map' objects that contain information regarding their grids and images - the grids themselves are defined very easily with offsets, dimensions and cell sizes. Based on this, all the functions are already in place to convert between coordinate spaces. This includes:

• Viewer Space: Where clicks are registered (generally between 0,0 and 800,600 or whatever the viewer's dimensions are)
• Map Space: The original dimensions of the map image (generally between 0,0 and 2000,1500). Any layered decals built on top of the images will be processed in this space, and finally reduced to viewer space at the end. This is so that I can work in a single, consistent space despite all of my zooming and panning.
• Grid Space: The x,y position within the cells. On the main world map, this is between 0,0 and 38,28.

Currently, the only features in place include the ability to zoom and pan around (with a grid that remains attached to the map, but is consistently 1 pixel thick regardless of how much you zoom in) and the ability to double click on a cell to switch to a different map image (currently just a blank piece of parchment).

This is pretty close to as far as I got with the Legend map viewer - however, this application is significantly better in many ways. For example, the grid is no longer redrawn, cell by cell, every time the image is changed. Instead, I cached all of my grids to hidden canvases, and draw the entire grid to the application with a single draw call. I intend to use this method extensively, especially with highlighting cells, and map decals.

So, without further ado, here's the map viewer in its current state. Note that I had to cut it down to 50% of the size to keep it from messing up the blog layout. If you want to see it at the full intended size, check it out here: http://ambidextrous-designs.net/ageofavarice/mapviewer/. Also, this will not work in older browsers (like IE8).

Click and drag to pan around, right click to recenter the map, scroll wheel to zoom. Double click to load into the other blank map page.

I hope to have a more impressive display soon! But I'm pretty damn pleased with how this has come out so far. If you want to check out the javascript behind it, it's right here: http://ambidextrous-designs.net/ageofavarice/mapviewer/js/mapviewer.js