I love when people make huge worlds like this for game jams. This fit the theme super well. I think the gameplay was a little tedious at times, but the world design and the goal of getting to the end kept me intrigued. The game looked pretty at times, but then sometimes the shadows would glitch all over the place. Is that a limitation with godot or did you mess up something? I've never utilized lights/shadows that much so I don't know. Anyways it was a cool journey and mostly very well executed!
Viewing post in The Operatorhood jam comments
hey, thanks for playing!
the glitchy shadows are not a Godot problem, but actually a few things on our end,
the day/night cycle setup is a little messed up I think, the sun angles are pretty awkward and lead to objects casting very long shadows for the majority of time. before we had environment art I “solved” this problem by simply disabling shadow casting for the terrain mesh. it stayed disabled for the release build and we never made a second iteration for the sun angles, so all the objects added later that do cast shadows (trees, buildings, etc.) often cast shadows that appear “detached” from the object itself, and pretty far away from it, because the ground they’re on does not cast shadows (that’s why shadows look way worse for the objects on hills).
then there’s also the issue of shadows disappearing/flickering as you move, I’m not entirely sure but I think it is also caused by the shadows being too long, which does not work very well with LOD.
also (there’s gonna be a few “alsos” here lol), we are using a custom potato heightmap terrain system, because at the beginning of the development we only found this plugin ( https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/231 ), and we were afraid it wouldn’t work for web build (which is quite important for jams), and more importantly, that we wouldn’t be able to modify the heightmap at runtime. the shader used to render the heightmap is far from perfect and I’m pretty sure it has some issues with calculating normals and due to it being a displacement shader, Godot might have some issues calculating bounding-boxes (I’m not sure how lighting works internally 🙈, but that might be a factor).
a cherry on top is that shadows appear deep fried because the sun is moving constantly, so you’re constantly seeing the edges flicker.
TL;DR - Godot is fine and I appreciate it a lot for the fact that in a setup like this shadows work at all xD
sorry for the chaotic response, but I really wanted someone to ask about the tech behind this game 🙈, so thank you!
thank you again for playing, cheers!