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Work started on the next update, which is not going to be any of the ones previously put on hold (and discussed in the videos). Because, it was decided to add something radically different, more combat oriented: namely the use of skills/abilities. The code is already there, now it only needs some animations. For now, this one below will be added to see how well it would fit.
It's the good ol' jump attack. Nothing fancy, just a quick and dirty work.
Also, now when mining, structures shouldn't disappear accidentally whilst mining near them. It's still a bug in the live version, and only will be patched with the next update; as there's no rush to fix it (it being super-late content).
Alright, it's more-or-less there, as there were a lot of bugs to fix as mentioned prior:
- Now you can push the cart on the rails, and nudge it very slow when not
- You can switch between 3 types of track: left, right, straight
While it's definitely not perfect, it is robust enough for a prototype. Switches and other useful bits are planned to be part of a commercial release, but not for a prototype. Now, time to make sure you can purchase and place the cart in-game (as currently the cart is being spawned in at the beginning), and be able to store ores and bring it home. Which is going to take a few days to code and test, especially knowing that mobs could attack the cart as well as destroy it (and loose a portion of the contents inside). See some of the progress below.
While it's far from complete, as this was just a mere test (as it has a lot of kinks that need to be fixed), it has proven to be quite beneficial for future en-devours, to work out a different method of generating dungeons (as seen in the image). Overall more efficient and faster, which would result in less loading screens.
Now comes the next part: Assembling a tiny test world with procedural tiles. Where all will come together eventually. Would note that this will be the first addition to the prototype that won't effect gameplay at all, will only serve as a visual representation of what-it-supposed-to-be: Purely as a result of it being non-functional by not completing the underlying code. Otherwise it would in full swing, just right now it doesn't serve that intended purpose, other than giving space for trying out new concepts for generating content. Efforts are put best elsewhere.
There's been something interesting and quite the difficult in the making: procedural content. Have spent the last few days iterating on all different kinds of simple models (to no avail), because to be frank, anything procedural takes a lot of time and effort (many weeks just to get the basics done right), and a lot of optimization (to speed it up, etc.). However, even knowing what you're doing (well kind of not in my case), there's a limit to how fast BP code can run. Which is why I've ditched my usual methods for creating procedural dungeons (there's a whole list of steps you've to go through, some footage are available on my YT channel if interested). And as this is just a prototype, was excessively trying to come up with a solution that could require the least amount of computation (and fastest to iterate, well its fast but took a lot to set it up, more so than usual), while still being able to deliver a semi-decent result in the form of "organic" content (as generating is one thing, you've to make sure the content is valid, and fix if need be (like the paths); which takes a lot of time in game too, in the form of a loading bar). So while I'm not 100% sure this 5th iteration will work out, so far this is the most promising (plus doesn't include working with arrays, which is always a plus; those can be nasty, and requite a lot of workaround, so this time it was time to ditch those), but at least now we can generate something that looks like a path (for interior, dungeon scenes). See image below:
While it's nothing remarkable, just yet, it already skips a lot of the traditional aspects of generation (like finding points for paths via pathfinding, angles, rotations, etc.), which means that this was made almost instantly; and can be extended forever. Now comes the rooms and should be good to go.
And to spice up things a little bit, to help the project (as it's currently going "nowhere" in terms of project goals), it is planned that the next release will be covered by a proper devlog on Youtube if possible (not sure yet, things are quite hectic around here). Not sure how or in what format, but probably something that would be nice to watch.
Work started on the next release version:
- transparency logic got an update (behaves a tad better)
- added some slight bloom
- two structures are being added (modeled, textured and partially animated already) for the next update (exploration and who knows what) for which one of them is going to get a waterfall (see image below). The assets are half done, and under implementation.
