Official development blog

Yearly Archives: 2023

Year 10 of the Cogmind

Well then, we’re well into Cogmind’s 10th year now xD It’s kinda hard to nail down a clear “ten-year” mark, since we could measure Cogmind’s age from its birth as a 7DRL nearly 12 years ago, or when I started working on it full time in mid-2013, or its first commercial release in May 2015, […]

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Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 4: Polishing

The core functionality of our map zooming feature is operating smoothly–common windows are popping up where they’re supposed to go, map interaction itself appears normal… however there are plenty of less vital systems that still need to consider the effect of zooming. And after those there’s the public-facing side of this feature, like how do […]

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Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 3: Implementation

Time to get serious! Last time I told you about my engine upgrade and the new “quads,” now it’s to put them to use. If you recall, for my initial Cogmind map zoom demo upon adding Quad support to REX, all I did was change one thing in the game: the map font size. The […]

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Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 2: Engine-level Architecture

Taking a different tack from last time, I decided that it would be worth getting really dirty with low-level engine work for the next attempt at map zooming. One of the main reasons we’d need to go this route if there’s ever to be hope of reasonable performance in software mode: Dirty rects. If we […]

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Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 1: Realtime Image Scaling

A few years back I introduced an experiment to demonstrate a potential “overmap” implementation that still obeys the rules of the terminal interface. What about the opposite–a way to zoom the map itself? Obviously this would be intended for a completely different purpose, addressing one of the more common complaints about Cogmind, that on some […]

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