To start with, something slightly tangential: I spent some time listening to some of the game- and movie- related music of
Gavin Dunne (a.k.a. "Miracle of Sound"), and was inspired to try something similar for A Door to the Mists. I'm no great musician or singer, I fear, so I've kept it to text--a poem, essentially. You should be able to read it here:
"Lose Myself in the Mist"
On a related note, I've rearranged the website just a little:
- Gone is the "media" page (I believe that I concluded that it didn't make a lot of sense to have a single page for media related to all and any projects).
- Instead, the project-page for A Door to the Mists now has sub-pages each for "videos" and "screenshots"--and one for "Lose Myself in the Mist", above.
- These sub-pages each have navigation links, allowing visitors to quickly return to either the "Projects" or "A Door to the Mists" pages.
- On a minor note, I've removed the old concept/promo art that I had previously posted there.
Along with this, I replaced the screenshots on those pages with newer ones.
Returning to the game itself, as I said, a fair bit of the week's work was technical in nature. I made a number of tweaks to both climbing and crouching; overall, I feel that both of these should be smoother and less buggy, now.
(For example, I believe that I found a place in which the player could stand from a crouch and have their "standing collider" immediately intersect a wall, thus resulting in the character being ejected out into the "pit". This should no longer happen, thanks to adjustments to the collider used to detect whether there's space enough to stand.)
On a similar--but slightly less successful--note, I discovered that it was possible for the player to push themselves into a particular low tunnel while still standing, despite the tunnel being (ostensibly) too low for this. This resulted in some glitchy behaviour (such as the camera clipping through the ceiling). Further, this has been an issue in at least one other part of the level, as I recall.
The issue, it seems, is that the player-character's physics collider is "pill-shaped", and thus curved on the top. This means that, as it's pushed into certain ceiling surfaces, it's forced downwards. The game's logic tries to push it up again, and glitchy behaviour can result.
I tried two separate adjustments to the player-character's physics in attempts to solve this issue, but neither worked out.
For now, then, I'm simply keeping an eye open for such places, and attempting to adjust the level-geometry to be less prone to such issues. I've done this for the tunnel in question, for example, and thus far it seems to have worked.
Moving from gameplay to graphics, I've further tweaked the various shaders in use. Perhaps the most interesting change (to my mind, at least), is "normal quantisation":
In short, normal-vectors--or rather the components thereof not aligned with the surface normal--are now divided up into "bins" by length. The number of bins, however, varies by distance from the viewer: the further away the fragment is, the fewer bins there are, and thus the less-complex the normals are. This slightly simplifies normals in the distance, the intention being to reflect the simplified strokes that might be used in painting a backdrop. The effect is somewhat subtle right now, but overall, I like it.
Returning to level-editing, work continued in the week just past on the first level, and especially on and around the "pit" area shown in the animation above. It's not quite done, but I feel that it's coming close.
You might note in that animation that the distant ledges have a cool light about them. This comes from another "blob-light", pale, large, and dim. Perhaps more noteworthy, however, is that the light's direction is a bit odd: this particular "blob-light" produces light shining
inwards, towards the origin of the "blob", rather than radiating outwards.
I also changed how the player's translation-lexicon is updated in this level. Up until this point, the player's lexicon was automatically updated as soon as they entered the level. I wasn't terribly happy with this, so I've now added a "book", found in the outdoors part of the level, that produces this effect instead.
The prologue level saw a few touch-ups, too: the outer wall was made a little paler, the vines draping it have seen changes to their normals and shininess, and the interior pedestals have had some fixes to their geometry.
Finally, as per usual, there were other changes and bug-fixes not mentioned above.
As you can see, a somewhat busy week! :D
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^