Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, some progress on the main menu--specifically, mist showing behind the buttons when the player hovers over them. (The buttons themselves are stand-ins.)
The week just past was another slow one, I fear; this was likely at least exacerbated by sleeping issues that resulted in my being rather tired through most of the week.
Still, somewhat did get done! Let me elaborate:
Most of the work done in the week just past went into the main menu, I believe:
To start with, the backdrop image should now be placed as intended. Specifically, I have it such that the image always fits the width of the game-window, with more or less of the image being cut off at the top and bottom according to the window's aspect ratio.
As a result of that last, I extended the backdrop image both up- and downwards: it had been laid out for a wide-screen format previously, meaning that when its width was fitted to a narrower window chunks of blank space appeared above and below it. The new sections don't add much in terms of content: they're simply extensions.
I also reworked a few elements of the image, correcting some issues that I discovered. This isn't quite done, I think: I'm not yet confident that I'm quite happy with the layout.
Perhaps most problematic were the buttons of the menu itself. I've struggled to come up with a design that I find satisfactory: while I've come up with versions that I like in and of themselves, thus far none have felt to me as though they matched the setting and the story. For now this is very much a work-in-progress. (The design shown in the screenshot above is one of those that I tried and set aside, I believe.)
A little more successful has been an effect that I've added behind the buttons: when the player hovers the mouse over one, mist appears behind it, only to dissipate when the mouse is moved away. This currently uses the mist-effect from the game's cutscenes, which seems to do a decent job of it, I think. There are some touch-ups that I may want to make, but overall I'm happy, I believe.
Moving on from the main menu, then, I continued work on getting the engine up and running again. Specifically, I set aside my earlier intention of switching to Panda3D 1.10, instead attempting to back-port the handling of vertex colours that 1.10 provides into 1.9.4. My thanks to Rdb, one of the developers behind Panda3D, I believe, for pointing me to the relevant code!
Thus far this seems to be somewhat successful. That said, there is at least one mysterious issue to chase down, and I'm having some trouble with the "run-time distributable" build--the version that would be used to create a copy of the game that would run on another machine. The former will likely call for investigation on my end, while I'm seeking help on the latter via the Panda3D forums.
Finally, I discovered a bug in the shader that I use for "light flares" (such as one might see when standing in a dark room and looking at an open doorway leading to the bright outdoors). Quite when this bug slipped in I'm not sure--it may have come with changes to the engine, or some earlier change to the game on my part. One way or another, I believe that I have it fixed now!
That's all for this week, then--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^