To start with, I began work on UV-mapping the edges of walls.
I forget whether I've mentioned this issue previously, so let me explain:
UV-mapping the broad sides of walls is fairly straightforward. There may be some minor discontinuities at corners, but I think that they're nothing too serious.
The problem arises when a wall's narrow edges are visible. For example, imagine a ruined building, its missing roof exposing the tops of its walls. Now, the UVs on one side of a wall closely match those of the other. This means that the UVs of the edges between one side and another will end up pretty much flat, crossing few-to-no pixels, and thus result in the texture being "smeared" across the edges.
So, how does one align the UVs in this case?
One idea that I had was to cut the edges down their middle, and then offset those middle UVs. This would allow the edges to use more of the texture, and thus reduce smearing, at the cost of being "mirrored" along the mid-lines.
In the week just past, I tried it, and... it didn't work. Aside from being slow and tedious, it turned out that the normals didn't function as expected when mirrored across the mid-line, producing a visible artefact.
I have one or two ideas that I might yet try--we'll see how things go...
Another issue that I've been dealing with is that, as levels become larger, the process of exporting them from Blender and importing them into Panda3D becomes very slow. On my computer, level two can take hours to import. This interferes with development at times.
In the week just past I put some work into addressing this issue. I don't want to simply pass the time off to players--even a small increase in loading times might add up across many players.
But, having asked for help on the Panda3D forum, I may have at least one potential solution to investigate: it seems that it may be possible to export levels piecemeal, then merge them into a single file once they're ready.
Finally, I started in on adding curbs to the streets of level two. This seems like it might not be as slow and unpleasant as I'd feared, and I think that it improves the appearance and verisimilitude of the level. However, it's also a little too nascent for me to be comfortable in showing it just yet.
And that is all for this week! Stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^