Been tinkering around with the current version of the Accidental Engine. Have completely replaced libnoise with my own stuff, which provides selectable interpolation schemes, selectable basis function types (value, gradient, simplex, voronoi functions, image-buffer sampling, geometric shapes) low-level basis function domain turbulence, most of which libnoise did not support. I've moved all high-level logic into Lua scripts, so that it is easy to import the low-level components and get a basic application up and running in a matter of minutes.

I've abstracted out the various map types into components. It is as simple to setup a simple top-down rectangular tilemap in the style of old-school Gauntlet as it is to setup a 3D map in the style of the old Golem 3D engine. There are still limitations on the 3D map (ie, certain view-angle restrictions to keep the camera pointed down; no views of the horizon or sweeping panoramas) but in view of the purposes of Accidental, those restrictions are reasonable and well within the design.

I've also migrated (finally) to Lua 5.1. My game logic so far has been implemented without co-routines. While I perceive the utility of such things, I still have not bothered to make use of them. However, the language is moving on and right now it was much simpler to make the change while my code-base of Lua scripts is numbered only in the tens of thousands of lines. Another few years down the line, the task would be.... ummmm.... daunting, I guess.

The lack of updates in my journal might make it seem as if I have been doing nothing, but in fact for the last several months I have been quite busy. I think I have finally learned my lesson about making too much noise about my projects on the Intarweb thingamajigs. Generates too many emails of the variety 'when is a demo coming out?' and places too much pressure on me to produce. I'm a hobbyist; nothing beats pressure for sucking the life out of the dream.