~Shylor

I got the Verek demo now to start using data from the map editor. The directions work and will only show active locations to move too. Also just a few minutes ago I got portals online.

The map editor was only one part of the entire project I have been working on. To me it was the most important one. The engine is not called “Verek” named after my first game design buddy which I am happy I still talk to him today (tho he is not really into game design anymore).

The main reason behind the engine was to make something that we could built a game on fast and easy. It seems we tried so many ways of doing this, but there was always something major we had to learn to get the project done and we failed at it. So this is why I am attempting to build a simple engine that allows people to finally make the game they have been wanting too!

Since I started working on the map editor I have been trying to make it faster. Well today I was talking with my dad about the project (he liked text-based games a lot in the day). I was talking to him about speed of the editor when it hit me.

GZip! GZip is a web trick where the developer will tell the server to check with your browser, if your browser supports GZip (most do now) it will zip the HTML file smaller and send it to your browser to unzip it.

Well I tried it and ran it through a GZip test site and was shocked at what I seen.

Original Size: 308.46KB
Gzipped Size:  15.25KB
Date Savings: 95.06%

This is major, the map almost blinks up now. So to the followers that are watching the project. Can you see a difference?

First off I want to thank everyone for the comments I have been getting from the feedback page. They help to keep me going. Also I know some of you want ajax power, well I do not have enough skill yet to do that, maybe in 2.0 :P

Like I said in the last post I wanted to get some of the options saved into the database. I did get portal 1 and 2 into the database now 3, 4, and 5 still can not be saved. I plan on doing the other 3 in 0.14.

Also I changed how the save area system works so it can handle the other tabs, so let me know if you get some save issues.

I also fixed an issue that would have caused data not to be saved right, before you even knew about it. :)

I am on version 0.12 now. So whats my plans for a bit.

I plan on moving away from the main map editor for a bit, and working more on the area editor and getting the data from that saved. I also want to work on a small demo of the gameplay so some can see where I am aiming this.

I added a CSS trick to make the images load a bit faster then before. It works by pre-loading them first. I looked as thought if goes a bit faster, not instant by any means, but faster. Even IE seemed to load the images faster. However IE still has issues with slow Javascript.