Summary: In which player-light- and glass- shaders see work; blob lights can be softer or harder; conversations can be extended; Panda's particle panel gives trouble; a new particle panel is embarked upon; and a vertex-shadow shader is begun.
Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, a new (work-in-progress) particle editor:
(The particle effect shown isn't anything intended for the game--it was made simply for demonstration purposes.)
The week just past was a bit of an odd one, as I was diverted from my usual work into a bit of tool-creation--specifically, the creation of the particle-editor shown above. Let me explain:
Monday, June 4. 2018
A Tale of Two Particle Panels
To start with, work continued as usual.
I made some minor adjustments to the player-light shader--specifically, I forced it to produce absolute darkness beyond a certain threshold. This, as I recall, was done to reduce the likelihood of odd monitor/graphics-card settings showing areas that should be entirely in darkness.
I also continued with my glass shader, which I believe that I mentioned last week. As it stands, this isn't perfect (and I have some ideas that I might try), but it's working. I actually ended up taking an idea regarding the edging of the glass from a shader that I made for a game-jam.
Blob-lights also saw some work--they can now be "softer" or "harder", making them a bit more flexible. For one, this has been employed in the light that shines through the entrance to the level proper from the room outside it: Where before the light was somewhat concentrated at its centre (which I wasn't quite happy with), now the light is spread out more over the area covered by the "blob". This makes, I feel, for a better representation of dim light falling through a hole onto a nearby surface.
One change that I'm particularly happy with is that it's now possible to load additional lines into a conversation--meaning that I can now tack on lines in response to player actions. In the case of level two, this can happen if the player finds a certain hidden cache of books; if they do, then the character mentions it to the adventurer that she's there to meet. Further, if they take a book, that too gets a mention.
(The actual lines haven't yet been written; I currently just have place-holder lines being loaded at the moment. The logic for adding them in response to the relevant actions seems to be working, however!)
Now, you may recall the "distant light" that gives direction in level two. That light comes from an adventurer's lantern, and, as one might expect, there's fire in that lantern. I gave some thought to how I wanted to represent that fire, and after considering a few options, I settled on the classic approach of particles.
You may further recall that particle effects are already supported in the game, and indeed in the editor too.
So, I made a new particle effect in Panda's particle panel, and attempted to load it. There were a few stumbles--it seems that since last I added a particle effect in the editor, some changes had been made that affected their use. But those were pretty simple to fix, as I recall.
I loaded the effect into the level and... nothing happened. The editor's 3D "icon" for a particle effect was present and worked as expected, but there were no particles in evidence. I thought that perhaps there was a problem with particles in "player-lit" cells, so I moved it to a "sun-lit" cell, but there were still no particles.
Conversely, a previously-made effect (the "falling leaves" from the prologue) did work.
I ended up checking the file produced by the particle panel--and it seems that a large chunk of it had for some reason not been written! I tried re-creating the effect in the panel, but it produced the same result.
This was rather frustrating, as I recall. On top of this, I don't overmuch like Panda's particle panel: it's clunky, prone to throwing up errors (often seemingly-harmless but distracting), and can be unreliable, in my experience.
I started to consider making my own particle panel. But particle effects in Panda3D are quite feature-rich, meaning that there's quite a lot to support. I checked the forum for an alternative particle editor--but while I did find one, for some reason I wasn't comfortable with using it.
So I decided to indeed make my own--and that project took up much of the rest of the week.
My new panel isn't yet done: I don't yet have support for particle-forces, and haven't yet implemented my own saving and loading (in place of Panda3D's "ptf" files).
Nevertheless, as shown above it's making progress, and already in some ways feels rather better to me than Panda's particle panel. (Not that it's a marvel of ergonimics--it has a little clunkiness of its own, in all fairness.)
Towards the end of the week I set aside the panel--I was feeling somewhat fatigued with it, as I recall--and instead worked on a new shader. This one is intended to produce some simple, animated, vertex-based shadows, ostensibly "thrown" by one of the blob-lights. This is very much a work-in-progress. Indeed, I'm not yet sure that what I have in mind will work, although I think that I'm making progress.
And along the way I made a variety of minor changes and fixes, which don't seem worth detailing here.
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
I made some minor adjustments to the player-light shader--specifically, I forced it to produce absolute darkness beyond a certain threshold. This, as I recall, was done to reduce the likelihood of odd monitor/graphics-card settings showing areas that should be entirely in darkness.
I also continued with my glass shader, which I believe that I mentioned last week. As it stands, this isn't perfect (and I have some ideas that I might try), but it's working. I actually ended up taking an idea regarding the edging of the glass from a shader that I made for a game-jam.
Blob-lights also saw some work--they can now be "softer" or "harder", making them a bit more flexible. For one, this has been employed in the light that shines through the entrance to the level proper from the room outside it: Where before the light was somewhat concentrated at its centre (which I wasn't quite happy with), now the light is spread out more over the area covered by the "blob". This makes, I feel, for a better representation of dim light falling through a hole onto a nearby surface.
One change that I'm particularly happy with is that it's now possible to load additional lines into a conversation--meaning that I can now tack on lines in response to player actions. In the case of level two, this can happen if the player finds a certain hidden cache of books; if they do, then the character mentions it to the adventurer that she's there to meet. Further, if they take a book, that too gets a mention.
(The actual lines haven't yet been written; I currently just have place-holder lines being loaded at the moment. The logic for adding them in response to the relevant actions seems to be working, however!)
Now, you may recall the "distant light" that gives direction in level two. That light comes from an adventurer's lantern, and, as one might expect, there's fire in that lantern. I gave some thought to how I wanted to represent that fire, and after considering a few options, I settled on the classic approach of particles.
You may further recall that particle effects are already supported in the game, and indeed in the editor too.
So, I made a new particle effect in Panda's particle panel, and attempted to load it. There were a few stumbles--it seems that since last I added a particle effect in the editor, some changes had been made that affected their use. But those were pretty simple to fix, as I recall.
I loaded the effect into the level and... nothing happened. The editor's 3D "icon" for a particle effect was present and worked as expected, but there were no particles in evidence. I thought that perhaps there was a problem with particles in "player-lit" cells, so I moved it to a "sun-lit" cell, but there were still no particles.
Conversely, a previously-made effect (the "falling leaves" from the prologue) did work.
I ended up checking the file produced by the particle panel--and it seems that a large chunk of it had for some reason not been written! I tried re-creating the effect in the panel, but it produced the same result.
This was rather frustrating, as I recall. On top of this, I don't overmuch like Panda's particle panel: it's clunky, prone to throwing up errors (often seemingly-harmless but distracting), and can be unreliable, in my experience.
I started to consider making my own particle panel. But particle effects in Panda3D are quite feature-rich, meaning that there's quite a lot to support. I checked the forum for an alternative particle editor--but while I did find one, for some reason I wasn't comfortable with using it.
So I decided to indeed make my own--and that project took up much of the rest of the week.
My new panel isn't yet done: I don't yet have support for particle-forces, and haven't yet implemented my own saving and loading (in place of Panda3D's "ptf" files).
Nevertheless, as shown above it's making progress, and already in some ways feels rather better to me than Panda's particle panel. (Not that it's a marvel of ergonimics--it has a little clunkiness of its own, in all fairness.)
Towards the end of the week I set aside the panel--I was feeling somewhat fatigued with it, as I recall--and instead worked on a new shader. This one is intended to produce some simple, animated, vertex-based shadows, ostensibly "thrown" by one of the blob-lights. This is very much a work-in-progress. Indeed, I'm not yet sure that what I have in mind will work, although I think that I'm making progress.
And along the way I made a variety of minor changes and fixes, which don't seem worth detailing here.
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
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