Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshots show some early steps in building level two:
The week just past was a moderate one, I feel, with a number of things being done:
Monday, April 2. 2018
Level-Building Uncertainties
Summary: In which the demo makes incremental progress; work on building level two is begun; there are uncertainties as to how to go about this; a shader is experimented with; and climbing bugs are fixed.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshots show some early steps in building level two:
The week just past was a moderate one, I feel, with a number of things being done:
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshots show some early steps in building level two:
The week just past was a moderate one, I feel, with a number of things being done:
First of all, a little progress was made towards getting the demo ready to release.
Specifically, I had an issue under Windows in which the cursor seemed to be vertically offset, making its use awkward. The solution was fairly simple: just use a ".cur" file (which includes hot-spot data), rather than a ".ico" file (which doesn't). It was slightly complicated by "icotool"--the tool that I use under Ubuntu to convert files to ".cur" format--perhaps not recording the data as expected. I ended up getting a hex-editor and, referencing a Wikipedia page on the file-format, setting the appropriate bytes as called for!
(Right now, I think that the only thing yet to be done for the demo--aside from some basic cleanup of which files are included--is to read through two third-party licences, checking that all is well there, and editing my "credits/legal" file if called for.)
But perhaps the main work of the week just past went into a start on roughing out level two; some of the level's current state is shown above.
(The in-game level-file is currently named "level2_future", as the demo already has a file named "level2". I'll presumably rename the new level once the demo is done!)
I've been somewhat uncertain of the best way to approach building this level.
For one thing, this level is larger than the previous, so my written draft doesn't include every building. This leaves me feeling somewhat afloat when it comes to the specific layout of the place.
Further, I learned in building the last level that while prototyping, it can be a nuisance to have to copy-paste objects between Blender-layers in order to keep the visual- and collision- geometries matching.
And finally, with a number of buildings to construct, I want a reasonably easy method--perhaps something involving prefabricated elements--rather than hand-constructing each.
For the copy-paste issue I think that I've found at the least an improvement on my previous approach: Blender allows me to give two objects the same underlying data, meaning that a change to one is reflected in the other--while nevertheless allowing them to have different tags (such as indicating collision geometry).
I'm still a little uncertain about how to improve my construction efforts; I may do some research into what other developers have done.
As to the layout, what I currently have in mind is to sketch a layout on paper, based on my written description. We'll see how that goes, I suppose!
(I'll confess that I have gone slightly beyond bare "grey-boxing"--I've added a trigger for the "player-light", and a "blob-light" to emulate light falling through the hole that you see above. This is simply a part of the way that I work, I feel--I seldom stick purely to one thing or another.)
On the visual side, I discovered in testing a build of this new level that the player-light didn't extend quite as far as I wanted it to. I've thus increased its range a bit. (This may even improve visibility in the prologue level, where the dark colour of the stone makes things murkier than with the lighter stone of the first level.)
I also experimented with a "painterly" post-process shader. The technique showed some promise, I feel--and didn't seem as heavy on performance as I'd feared. However, it also wasn't to my satisfaction, so for now I've shelved it.
On the technical side, experimenting with climbing in the second level led to the discovery of a new bug in the climbing mechanic, which could occasionally result in the player-character being stuck in a wall! Worse, it led me to discover further problems in the system. I think that I have all of it fixed now, but--as with the previous such bug-fix, I believe--it was a process that incurred some anxiety.
And finally, there were once again some changes that don't seem worth mentioning here.
So that then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
Specifically, I had an issue under Windows in which the cursor seemed to be vertically offset, making its use awkward. The solution was fairly simple: just use a ".cur" file (which includes hot-spot data), rather than a ".ico" file (which doesn't). It was slightly complicated by "icotool"--the tool that I use under Ubuntu to convert files to ".cur" format--perhaps not recording the data as expected. I ended up getting a hex-editor and, referencing a Wikipedia page on the file-format, setting the appropriate bytes as called for!
(Right now, I think that the only thing yet to be done for the demo--aside from some basic cleanup of which files are included--is to read through two third-party licences, checking that all is well there, and editing my "credits/legal" file if called for.)
But perhaps the main work of the week just past went into a start on roughing out level two; some of the level's current state is shown above.
(The in-game level-file is currently named "level2_future", as the demo already has a file named "level2". I'll presumably rename the new level once the demo is done!)
I've been somewhat uncertain of the best way to approach building this level.
For one thing, this level is larger than the previous, so my written draft doesn't include every building. This leaves me feeling somewhat afloat when it comes to the specific layout of the place.
Further, I learned in building the last level that while prototyping, it can be a nuisance to have to copy-paste objects between Blender-layers in order to keep the visual- and collision- geometries matching.
And finally, with a number of buildings to construct, I want a reasonably easy method--perhaps something involving prefabricated elements--rather than hand-constructing each.
For the copy-paste issue I think that I've found at the least an improvement on my previous approach: Blender allows me to give two objects the same underlying data, meaning that a change to one is reflected in the other--while nevertheless allowing them to have different tags (such as indicating collision geometry).
I'm still a little uncertain about how to improve my construction efforts; I may do some research into what other developers have done.
As to the layout, what I currently have in mind is to sketch a layout on paper, based on my written description. We'll see how that goes, I suppose!
(I'll confess that I have gone slightly beyond bare "grey-boxing"--I've added a trigger for the "player-light", and a "blob-light" to emulate light falling through the hole that you see above. This is simply a part of the way that I work, I feel--I seldom stick purely to one thing or another.)
On the visual side, I discovered in testing a build of this new level that the player-light didn't extend quite as far as I wanted it to. I've thus increased its range a bit. (This may even improve visibility in the prologue level, where the dark colour of the stone makes things murkier than with the lighter stone of the first level.)
I also experimented with a "painterly" post-process shader. The technique showed some promise, I feel--and didn't seem as heavy on performance as I'd feared. However, it also wasn't to my satisfaction, so for now I've shelved it.
On the technical side, experimenting with climbing in the second level led to the discovery of a new bug in the climbing mechanic, which could occasionally result in the player-character being stuck in a wall! Worse, it led me to discover further problems in the system. I think that I have all of it fixed now, but--as with the previous such bug-fix, I believe--it was a process that incurred some anxiety.
And finally, there were once again some changes that don't seem worth mentioning here.
So that then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
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