The Player
The biggest change from last time is the addition of the player sprite. We still only have the one boring placeholder sprite, but it illustrates the point. I need to change some things about the animations, but overall it is pretty good. All the basic movement animations are ‘in’: standing, walking, running, flapping, and gliding. No bells and whistles yet, but we’ll get there.

Terrain
After adding the player sprite itself, most of the work went into handling nuances in the terrain. I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but the way I set up the procedural terrain coupled with only processing them on the fly can introduce some ‘bad’ tiles, where the surface starts and ends on one tile, but most of the actual terrain is either above or below the tile limits. This makes the tile empty (or totally full), but the tile below/above that should be showing the terrain has no way of knowing, resulting in some perfectly flat areas. It isn’t a HUGE deal; I actually kind of like the flat spots – I’ll be able to put content stuff there easily and they will be obscured by foliage later. Still, the problem is there — In the current demo/snapshot (Alpha 2008-10-15) you can see a couple of the tiles immediately at X=500, which is where I start you just to illustrate it.

Controls
The control scheme currently in the snapshot is similar to, but not exactly, the mouse control scheme I want to try out. Right now, your direction is based on the mouse position relative to the player (which is in the center). Clicking will accelerate the player up to a velocity determined by the distance to the mouse pointer. In other words, clicking right next to the player will result in a slow speed, which clicking far away will result in a very fast speed. Flapping (currently space, up, or W) increases your vertical velocity, which how you fly. When you want to ‘aim’ something like a bow and arrow or a lance, the mouse position will represent the direction. This will give maximum precision, add action to the gameplay (actual aiming instead of tab-target and skill spam), and make shooting backwards possible but harder (which is exactly what we want).

Right now the controls are tweaked to encourage exploration. While there isn’t much to see, this is the first time I can actually show you guys how big this world actually is. With that in mind, dragging the mouse off to the side will give your player some velocity, and he will continue running along, looping around the world, until you stop him. In actual gameplay, I’ll almost certainly be constantly reducing the velocity, so you need to keep dragging to maintain velocity. Again, something that will be tweaked once we actually get there.