Been steadily working on this RPG project an hour or two at a time and finally got around to making a new video. Though there's lots of stuff going on in this project, I still don't have something that can be called a "game". It's still just the PC wandering through a world where there isn't really anything that happens. Just the various features I thought would be fun to work on. The apparent responsiveness is a little slow between not having a fixed time step and having to do the video capture on an older laptop.

• Added some birds and NPCs into the world. They don't really do anything other than wandering around a bit and generally giving you something to look at.
  
• You can see my version of "Fast Travel" (I mentioned in my last post) when the PC is traveling along a road and those stars appear a bit in front of him.
  
• I don't have any examples of trying to steer through forests but there's a bit of walking around NPCs and buildings. It still needs some work as steering only takes place when collisions occur but I'm pretty confident I can work out something better when I figure on investing the time to do so.
  
• You can see a bit of what I've done with the hands (if they're not too small) in that you can see them swaying back and forth as the PC walks. They aren't directly connected to the sprites but are more like disembodied circles that follow the PC and NPCs around. The hands are capable of performing "gestures" when triggered. The only gestures you see in the video are the swaying of hands while walking and one that happens when the PC swings a staff around. It's supposed to be like a sort of reach and follow through sort of motion but I got lazy and used one of the test gestures I had previously gotten ready rather than properly doing up a custom one that fits better.
  
• I'm not certain yet but I think combat is going to change from the little bit that you see in the video. I'm thinking about changing from the more action based style I have now to something that's more turn based.
  
• Added regions and towns. (Started adding farms as well but they're not present in the video).
  
• Houses and farms are placed somewhat randomly around the town's epicenter. An NPC is added near each house that's placed.
  
• At a point closer to the end of the video I set off an "explosion" on a field of flowers, if you're wondering why it looks like a bunch of flowers just suddenly go flying. "Exploding" things was supposed to be a part of developing a spell of some kind which didn't go very far. But the functionality is there and I thought I'd show it a bit.
  
  Had a bit of trouble with SFML in that the (old) laptop that I do some of my testing on uses an old Intel graphics chip and there's been known issues. The problem I had was when it came to trying to do alpha blending to a couple different off screen buffers so that I could play around with lighting effects. It worked fine on the desktop that I do development on but not the laptop. The problem could probably be easily resolved by updating the graphics drivers but doing that sort of thing has been locked down by the laptop manufacturer and I haven't found any work around. So for the time being I won't be planning on doing anything with lighting in this project. It's a bit of a shame too because it seemed to set a mood when it did work.
  
  The past few weeks have been spent on trying to create towns and connect them with roads. So far I'm pretty happy with the results (screenshots below). The roads do this thing though where they switch back on themselves such that you get pockets of wide roads and this interferes with the fast travel that I have going. I'm currently looking at adding farms for NPCs to go work on. I want to do a schedule sort of thing where they go off to work and then return home or maybe stop at a pub or something. Maybe add a few other jobs eventually. I'm hoping that this will add a bit more life to the world and eventually lend towards creating situations for the player to interact with and do something other than wander around pointlessly.
  
  The regions were done using a Voronoi algorithm. I started out by finding points on my map that were 32 pixels apart from each other then applied the algorithm. The result was my island being divided up into square regions so I randomized the position of the points a bit and got a result like the one below with the small regions. Then, I choose a random point for where a town's epicenter would be and removed any points that were within a certain range and ran the algorithm again. And repeat the process until I've placed all the towns I want.
  
  (first pass)
  [sharedmedia=gallery:images:5509]
  
  (final pass)
  [sharedmedia=gallery:images:5510]
  
  (map blend with roads, buildings, and farms)
  [sharedmedia=gallery:images:5511]