Confederation Project Improves Pixel Art Fidelity & Internal Code

Hi all, I was hoping to have a playable test ready for the CIC birthday, but a few too many things have gotten in the way sadly... I've made a lot of progress on my format-reading library; I have a fairly short list of things I want to wrap up before I put it (and the viewer) up on github - it may be after the first Confederation test release, I'm not sure.

Art-wise one silly thing I realised was that my old widescreen redraws hadn't taken into account the non-square pixels in WC1/2 (being 320x200), so I've also been redrawing those to be even wider, to match my original 21:9 widescreen goal - at the proper original aspect ratio this time. Here's a selection of those (works-in-progress), scaled to a proper 21:9 resolution:

Confederation itself has been going through a major rewrite - ripping out all of the format reading stuff into this library was a good chance to rid myself of a bunch of cruft which had built up over the years.

I've decided that the first releases will be explicitly a series of tech tests (which it would be anyway, but so intent/expectations are clear). To that end it will begin with a multiplayer/cooperative test to cover as much ground as possible. Since I've run out of time for the CIC birthday, I'll give it some more time in the oven; but hopefully it shouldn't be too far off. I'm now aiming for a few weeks from now, so we'll see how that goes.

Of course it may take multiple tests over a period of time to get things fully working... Hopefully enough people are interested in helping test it, with the understanding that there will almost certainly be many issues to sort out! It'll be for Windows, Linux most likely, and Mac is a possibility (it'll happen eventually if not from the beginning).