Cityographer Update: Refining Functionality

Posted this update on Kickstarter last night, but some folks may not see the update or missed the Kickstarter:

I wanted to give you an update on Cityographer development.  In short, it goes well and a lot has been done, but there is still a lot to do.

The only really big things left to do are: revise saving & loading and implement an undo/redo feature.  Hexographer and Dungeonographer save a map to a plain text file that just uses line breaks & tabs to separate the data.  That occasionally causes issues when a new feature is added.  Cityographer will use an XML file so all the data has a place and adding a new field to an existing object doesn’t potentially throw off other data.  And “undo” is one of the most frequently asked for features.  Note: These features won’t be folded into Hexographer & Dungeonographer immediately because the code has diverged a good bit.

But I’m actually in the middle of refining the existing functionality.  For example, the generated city does currently give you names and characteristics for the people in every building.  But I do need to revise that so the people in the armorsmith building include armorers(!)  I also want to upgrade the formatting of the pop-ups that give you the building details so the price lists have nice columns.  To be honest there are a bunch of issues like this, and I’m whittling a couple each day.

I’m also building up the data files.  Price lists for different store types, names for inns, NPC characteristics, names for various cultures, etc.

I believe in my next update I’ll be able to give a fairly firm estimate to get an alpha version out to project backers.  Right now I want to whittle the issues down some and itemize the remaining issues in order to make that estimate.