So... most of the progress at this point has been on non-coding items, including a lot of the ASCII art.  Now all the various ruins and such have biome-appropriate art.

Well, that's not quite how the color cycling effect was supposed to go, but at least now I have more of a load screen.

Up and Down

After importing the updated maps generated, I went ahead and updated both automatic Z traversal (ramps) and queried Z traversal (stairs):

I'm going to really need to change some of the tiles, for example, when you're up on the highway, it's barely visible that you're not still on ground level.  Either that, or greatly increase the darkening of terrain below you.

Anyway, time to clean up the interface a bit so it looks more like an actual game, then move on to implementing inventory, creates, etc.

Back from a long break

Such are the hazards of single-developer projects. 

In any event, I more or less have rivers where I want them, in terms of water falls, multi-level canyons and river valleys, etc:

Now I need to plug it in the main program and work on up/down movement, and we should be largely ready to move on to more of the world building/quest part of the game.

Avoiding 3rd Party Bugs

So.. one of the recurrent issues, and one I may have mentioned in passing was the game's tendency to throw SystemAccessViolations, particularly when I was trying to do anything with changing the Direct2D brushes (which was a bit of an issue, since I was creating new brushes every time the screen changed.)  This wasn't as noticeable on high-end machines, but particularly on old, slower machines, the game crashed a lot.

As that particular violation is an unmanaged code violation (i.e. not something C# can generate) I couldn't really go deal with the problem directly (I guess it's something in the SharpDX code)  However, I got around it by just keeping a collection of brushes (Since I'm only altering the color) and only creating brushes if a combination doesn't match existing brushes.

This appears to have completely eliminated the problem, or at least made it very rare.  While there's nothing quite as infuriating as the very rare crash, at least in that case I should be able to emergency save to prevent the player from losing progress (as only the rendering is corrupt, at that point.)

No illustrative GIF on this one, the rendered result is the same as before (although faster on older computers)

Better Rivers

Well, River generation looks more natural now, but I'm still not terribly happy with it:

Even with some randomness, it's still way too clearly a sin-wave... which river systems frequently are in nature, just not that uniform.

Adjusted the rendering frame rate downward to see if that helped with flickering issues, and it did... a bit (and didn't hurt anything) but I think that issue still needs further work:

Terrain generation and Z levels

So, for the moment, the level builder is an external program, which makes some aspects of it easier to debug.  As I'd left off the main program for a bit to go build levels with a bit more Z interaction, I managed that relatively quickly:

The colored zone edges you're seeing as I pan up are the up-down ramps, where they are absent you're seeing more than 1 z level of separation, so essentially a cliff.

Technically I could go back to the main program and finish testing movement up Z levels, but there's still a bit of work to do with level generation, in terms of making more realistic terrain and some non-ruined cities, so that'll be next.