Hi there,
After spending yesterday with the brain salad surgery of my gnomes i was doing some polishing work today. Sometimes you need to change hard stuff to "feelgood" tasks from time to time. Although it is, i think, too early to polish stuff, it was now good to plan the next things and make the overall look and feel nicer.
So.. today i spent some time on make the world more "alive". While make things run arround on a grid is simple and having "idle" animations for entities is not bad things can pretty sterile.
So.. with some image manipulation you can achieve quite a lot..
Basically you can slice a sprite and move those slices indipendendly.. this creates the illusion of "wind" if you do that for plants.. and it is quite cheap to achieve (CPU/GPU).
Please dont mind the black area.. i have no idea what the driver or wayland update changed.. but i cant focus on a single window at the moment..
Also... the game already has had some sort of a light/darkness system. I basically share the same system for the "fog of war" and figured it would be easy to add "fire" to the game lighing up areas.. and when there is fire there should be smoke... so...
I render at the places where "fire" happens just some smoke particles (Note: No particle system.. i just draw a fixed sequence of white circles of various transparency values).
Last but not least i was able to finally give the mechanism System a major push by overengineering the whole thing. In the factories i program i have to define circuits, literally and methaphorcally. A circuit can be a PCB with bird seeds and chips on it.. but also dozens of meters long cables running through a plant containing exactly one signal (or network connection) from one source to one machine. At times you have to add junctions, some times you have to bridge over other cables. You have to distribute things and combine signals... and i really cant let go of my dayjob there.
So at this point i have to decide how far i want to go: Is it ok to do everything that, for example, Gnomoria did... or will i face a possible future that has someone in store that is going to run Doom on my poorly animated mechanisms?
We will see....