Shifty Shelving

To start with, the shelving shown above, found in a building at the edge of a small square. At this point in the level there may seem to be no clear way forward, neither from elsewhere in the square or from this building. But the scratches visible on the floor here suggest that the shelving has been moved in the past. And indeed, if the player examines the scratches, then examines the shelves, the option to "push aside" said shelves becomes available! Doing so reveals a hole in the wall, by which the player can then progress...

The shelving itself was quick to make: it's just a modification of a model that I had previously made, with a different set of textures.

The scratches called for a little more work:

My first attempt, as I recall, was to use my extant "mural" shader. But while this did sort-of work, I felt that it wasn't well-suited to this particular use. It's intended to portray a solid layer of colour (as of paint, etc.), flaking away in places, and showing the texture of the surface beneath. Scratches, however, might be softer, and add their own texture in the direction in which they run.

So I set to work on a new specialised shader. It's essentially a slightly-simplified version of the standard "player-light" shader--but with the addition of transparency (smoothly quantised via GLSL's "smoothstep" function), varied slightly via an additional texture.

Another major task in the week just past was the creation of two piles of rubble to replace two respective stand-in models. This went rather more quickly than the rubble-filled courtyard previously made, I'm glad to report! I'm not sure that I'm quite happy with them yet, however.

In addition, I worked on cleaning up the geometry of a few more of the level's damaged buildings (and one external wall). Specifically, these were the buildings associated with the above-mentioned rubble-piles, the building in which the above-shown shelving is found, and one other.

Here is one of the rubble-piles, along with the cleaned-up building associated with it:



The streets, too, saw some cleaning up: I went over each street-mesh, looking for places in which their models seemed to change direction a little too sharply, and generally smoothed those out a little. With this done, I also separated the collision meshes from the visible meshes.

That last helped in particular with the street-section that holds the "fake shadow" that I showed some time ago: those shadows are vertex-based, and can thus involve a dense cluster of vertices--which is superfluous for collision purposes. Separating the meshes thus allowed me to simplify the collision mesh somewhat, without affecting the shadow.

There's a large room in one building that serves to allow a player who misses a specific jump to return back to the roof from which they jumped. But there's a problem: this room doesn't have any apparent entrance, as I'd neglected to add one. A simple hole in the floor is all that's called for, allowing access down to the ground floor. But conversely, I don't really want it to have an entrance, as the rest of the building serves no particular purpose.

So in the week just past I cheated: there's now a set of shelves lying in one corner of the room, ostensibly covering the "entrance" that isn't there.

Another minor change was to the model used for non-interactive doors in this level: they now have a board nailed across them, hopefully making it clear that these doors are not openable.

And a number of other changes were made, but which don't seem worth detailing here.

That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^