I've written a new utility I'm calling TextOverImageCompositor, which allows the user to superimpose text of arbitrary size and color over a background image. I've used it to (mostly) convert the map of the third level of the game's first world to ASCII text using my SquarePlusMinusPipe font.

Oh, and I fixed the irritating "phantom" single-unit-length edges that were appearing within narrow walls. Like, wherever two walls "crossed", the junction would show an x inside a square, and similar problems There's a screenshot of the problem in a previous post. Compare the new version:

Eventually I'll have to replace the maze of halls and rooms in ThreeDeeMazeGame with more generalized meshes for the environments in UUW2. Towards that end, I worked on the LineArtImageToMeshConverter repository, at github.com/thiscouldbeb.... I'll need to further adapt that to allow for import.

Here's a screenshot of ThreeDeeMazeGame. Note that at some point I added another character, a chest, and a door, for flavor, though none of them do anything yet.

I have just finished refactoring this a bit so that it fits better into the standard game framework, and is more readable in general.

Okay, ten days later, I've made a first draft of all the conversations on the first level of the first region of the game. There are some relatively minor characters on lower levels that are missing, but this is probably good to get started.

Here's the first part for the first character:

I plan to take the strings file and use it, without modification, as the content source for an existing conversation engine of my own devising, part of my largest repo, GameFrameworkTS. I've also used that engine in a (more developed) clone of the game _Star Control 2_.

I recompressed strings.txt to a .zip file with a password on it, which will remain a secret so that I don't get sued--buy your own copy!--and added that .zip to my repository for my convenience.

The file is 560 kB, and looks like the included image. The first few strings are about keys and locks.

The plan is to eventually feed the line art of the _UUW2_ level into another application I wrote, to convert it to three-dimensional meshes. I actually wrote this one years ago, in the WordPress blog days, but I've just published it on GitHub, at thiscouldbebetter.github.io/Source/LineA....

The rendering of the image from the text map was done using a custom application written for the task, hosted at thiscouldbebetter.github.io/Source/TextT....

Here's a screenshot of the demo for that.

Here's the original automap image upon which the previous line maps are based, taken from a wiki. (Originally this was a static .gif, but if you try to upload a static .gif, Bluesky won't let you submit it, I guess because it thinks it's a misformatted animated .gif.)

Here's the GitHub repo: github.com/thiscouldbeb....

There's not too much there yet. The Resources directory has a screenshot of the game's completed automap for each level. The Content directory has text and line-art versions of the first level made from the corresponding map:

Here's the banner image for this site, taken from thiscouldbebetter.wordpress.com.

It's been a long time, but I'm now reminded that I had another image before this one, consisting of a gray cube jammed awkwardly among a pyramid of rounded-edged cylinders of various colors in a pyramidal array.

Here's the logo I'm using for this site. I'm not completely thrilled about the color palette--too pastel?--but I can't easily change a lot about it, as I have lost track of the original Blender files. Anyway, I tried to change it right after I made it and never found any tweaks I like better.

Oh, here's the Gravatar that was generated for my GitHub account when I started it lo these many years ago. I should change it to the logo that I'm using for this account, but then it might be lost forever, and I'm irrationally attached: