LoM, the dawn of a new era!
29 March 2012, 11:40 am
You must be thinking, is he really going to be posting something new regarding the Legend of Mazzeroth? To this I say yes!!!Since the development of the underlying framework based on much of LoM's code, LoM will soon seeing itself ported to NAS2D as its foundation which will bring several immense changes. I will take a moment now to go over some of them with you.
Number one, LoM is going back to its true roots as a 2D tile-based game using pixel art. Overall this means development will be much faster as that is much less complex than the Pseudo-Isometric 2.5D 'Diablo' style originally envisioned.
Number two, the new foundation, NAS2D, is much cleaner and more streamlined than the current base of LoM and will allow us to fix issues and add new functionality without necessarily being rushed to make the change within LoM itself on the client end. This greatly helps since we have limited programming resources as it is.
That is where LoM sits currently and what is happening here. If you have questions or anything feel free to leave comments or send me a PM and I would be happy to discuss or answer questions.
One more thing...
I am currently on a personal endeavor to create a native OS X tile map editor. For those mac fans out there that watch this project I will be working on a blog to go over the editor and its current state and see if I can get feed back from those of you that might be interested in using it. Keep your eyes out for that!
The Legend of Mazzeroth
The Legend of Mazzeroth is the project that started it all for New Age Software. It's seen years of development and gave birth to the code base that is now being developed as NAS2D.
Initially planned as a an ambitious 2D MMORPG project, LoM has been scaled back and has gone back to its roots as an old-school RPG reminiscent of 16-bit era Super Nintendo RPG's. If you've ever played Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Breath of Fire and Secret of Mana, you'll feel quite comfortable with this game too.
NAS2D Game Development Framework
is an open source, object oriented 2D game development framework written in C++. It was designed to make the development of games easier by providing a high-level interface. It handles the low-level tasks of setting up the video display, input, sound mixing, file loading, etc.
By using well known and well tested low-level libraries, NAS2D brings you all the power you need to develop the games you want. It even comes with all of its dependencies packaged up for you so you don't have to waste time scouring the web for external API's.
NAS2D's use of popular low level libraries also allows it to be highly portable. It's already tested and known to work on Windows and MacOS X. It has also been tested with success on Linux and BSD although no official distributions exist yet for those platforms.