After I added tile animation last year, I made Tilemap Town's web client rerender the screen 10 times per second whether or not there's any map changes, in order to make sure animations get displayed. I did some work a few weeks ago to reduce the amount of redrawing that the game does; it will only...
It took most of January this year, but I was able to integrate Luau into Tilemap Town, where you can create a "gadget" type item and then put a script on it, and it will automatically start and run and the script can react to events. Scripts currently cannot modify the map or go to other maps, and...
I set up a web app manifest for Tilemap Town's web app, so you can "install" it now if you want to pretend it's a native app. I would like to eventually do one (for desktops! I probably won't ever make a fully featured phone app), but this is nice in the meantime. At the very least it's nice having...
A bunch of stuff I changed or added this month (will repeat some stuff in earlier posts):
Overall changes:
I added a simple user profile feature to Tilemap Town where you can fill out a profile about yourself, like Second Life has. You can write about yourself, your interests and what you're looking to do on Tilemap Town, and you can set up a table with a list of accounts and such.
Previously I noticed...
I always intended to have animation in Tilemap Town work on units of 0.1 seconds, like BYOND does. That's a pretty convenient amount of time to work with, where it's a clean 100 milliseconds, and you can make it out of 6 60 Hz frames or 5 50 Hz frames, so NTSC and PAL machines can display animations...
hellomynameisjoe contributed a new font to use when displaying someone's name on the map, and it's very extensive and contains a lot of characters used in European languages as opposed to just ASCII like the previous font did.
There's a new feature where you can set a time amount where the client...
I finally added the ability to upload image files directly to Tilemap Town, so you no longer need to upload to an unrelated image host like Imgur. This is a feature that I've been wanting to add for 7 years and directing people to use an image hosting site has always been a temporary workaround. You...
I've wanted to support this for a long time, but had a hard time figuring out how I wanted to implement it, exactly. I prefer to add features in a generic way where lots of different use cases can fit into the same thing, to keep the overall protocol feeling clean and consistent if possible. I also...
Today I put a bunch of effort into improving both https://novasquirrel.com/town/ and https://novasquirrel.com/town/help.html to both be more organized and have more information. Tabs really help with that.
I also added a nice thing where you can see how many users are online before you even attemp...