Hello, I just downloaded the source code and I'm having trouble understanding a lot of the code. Mainly with the whole terrain and Level Grid stuff. I was wondering if you could maybe comment the code there a little more or elaborate on those a bit here? Thanks! I very much like this asset, there's a lot of good things here!
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Shouldn't be impossible, I'll see what I can do!
The main idea is that you make the level in "layers" corresponding to different Z layers, then the engine puts them together when the room loads (moving everything to the first layer, and adapting their Z values accordingly). It's mainly there to make it easier to design 3D levels in GM's room editor and doesn't have any benefits other than that.
(There's a bunch of backgrounds that add a grid to the Room Editor; those backgrounds are used to figure out the size of the Z-slices, so it gets a bit more WYSIWYG than if you had to keep track of a "slice_width" variable or somesuch)
There's also the terrain/ceiling-terrain (which is probably what I named "Level Grid" originally... was a while since I touched the source code last!), which is essentially support for less rectangular ground, and which can be randomly generated. Its purpose is to make the ground in outdoors / cave areas look less like it's made out of cubes, but I couldn't figure out good ways to CONTROL it from within the editor, so it's a bit of an experimental feature. There's special objects that will generate (and draw) terrain if you place them in a room, TERRAINCONTROL and TERRAINCEILCONTROL, look into the init_terrain() script (which has a commented-out block of code that randomly generates terrain) and the "field" room for an example of how to use it.
The "layers that get stacked on top of each other" and polygonal terrain features aren't mutually exclusive, either, so this could be used for levels like a tower in the middle of a forest, or such. (In Dearelict, the trees are actually just very tall cylinders with a bark texture, players just ASSUMES they're trees that stretch so far into the darkness they can't see any of their leaves. Tricks like this can be useful to save CPU power for enemies and stuff like that, GM and 3D rendering isn't really a match made in heaven...)
Did you increase the size of the active region as well? (Lighting is controlled by objects, so it won't happen until they load in)
If you did that and it still doesn't work, there's a few things you could try...
- Have lighting objects always be active, it shouldn't add too much of a performance penalty and it'll prevent them from popping into existence too abruptly. (But it WILL add a bit of performance penalty, so be careful about not having hundreds of lighting objects in the same room)
- Try to avoid clustering too many lighting objects together, since only the 8 nearest ones are used (since there's a hard limit to how many lights the rendering system can handle) and which are the nearest ones can change suddenly.
- It could be worth messing around with lighting sources' radius so they light stuff up less when they're far away (e.g. some code like radius = min(normalradius,<big number> - <number smaller than 1>*point_distance(x,y,player.x,player.y) ), but it could be a bit of work to fine-tune it. (The small number is the factor light radius changes with compared to distance, something like 0.25 should work well, and the big number should be the distance the light radius is fully restored, divided with the small number... if I didn't get the maths wrong, at least x3)