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anyway in other news i kinda did some 2-week gamedev stuff
i've been sitting on a "game test" setup for a while that has (currently) some very limited walking-around ability and also you can jump. this thing. that's also basically a summary of what i did: added in a matching 'ceiling' heightmap to go with the floor heightmap, and made it so quad generation works correctly 1. not draw non-existant tiles outside a cave map and 2. stitch together cave floors and ceilings reasonably. this actually was maybe like one or two days work in total but i stretched it out to like a week and a half b/c i was only picking at it.
also i ended up drawing a bunch of 24x24 tiles to try to replace the existing 16x16 ones, including a bunch of variants for some of them, but i didn't get around to coding those in. i think maybe the next two week project will be hooking in some more advanced texturing code so that i can actually randomly scatter tiles like that. right now all the tiles are these extremely repetitive minecraft-styled textures just because... i haven't actually drawn or assembled anything more complex. a starting goal would be to draw 2x2 tile regions for every material, plus a bunch of random misc tiles, or maybe two different versions of tiling 2x2 regions that have their quadrants individually picked... basically anything to break up the pure repetition. also making the environments themselves not just big rectangular boxes would help a lot
(visually i think a lot about like... final fantasy tactics, breath of fire 3 & 4, vagrant story, which are all games that had very limited texture space and did a lot with that. i mean, they did that by not having generic textures at all; every area in fft and vagrant story was custom-painted with mostly-unique textures. the entire idea of minecraft-style "block types" is not something those games did.)
also the end goal for the cave rendering is to be able to render both a "surface" map (floor only) as well as a "cave" map (floor and ceiling), along with liming up render holes in both to seamlessly move from one to the other. kenshi not having any underground sections really messed me up etc
or like, people talk about "game mechanics" a lot and sometimes it's easy to forget that like, "a menu" is a game mechanic. "moving around space" is a game mechanic. a game that has seamless 3d environments has constructed its "spatial navigation" mechanic differently than a game with 2d tile grids has. so all of the cave rendering stuff is a part of working on how the game presents space to the player. uhhhh we'll see how that goes
anyway like i said in the tumblr post, all that's complicated so i might just draw a bunch of tiles instead. that's easier and looks nicer.
i've been sitting on a "game test" setup for a while that has (currently) some very limited walking-around ability and also you can jump. this thing. that's also basically a summary of what i did: added in a matching 'ceiling' heightmap to go with the floor heightmap, and made it so quad generation works correctly 1. not draw non-existant tiles outside a cave map and 2. stitch together cave floors and ceilings reasonably. this actually was maybe like one or two days work in total but i stretched it out to like a week and a half b/c i was only picking at it.
also i ended up drawing a bunch of 24x24 tiles to try to replace the existing 16x16 ones, including a bunch of variants for some of them, but i didn't get around to coding those in. i think maybe the next two week project will be hooking in some more advanced texturing code so that i can actually randomly scatter tiles like that. right now all the tiles are these extremely repetitive minecraft-styled textures just because... i haven't actually drawn or assembled anything more complex. a starting goal would be to draw 2x2 tile regions for every material, plus a bunch of random misc tiles, or maybe two different versions of tiling 2x2 regions that have their quadrants individually picked... basically anything to break up the pure repetition. also making the environments themselves not just big rectangular boxes would help a lot
(visually i think a lot about like... final fantasy tactics, breath of fire 3 & 4, vagrant story, which are all games that had very limited texture space and did a lot with that. i mean, they did that by not having generic textures at all; every area in fft and vagrant story was custom-painted with mostly-unique textures. the entire idea of minecraft-style "block types" is not something those games did.)
also the end goal for the cave rendering is to be able to render both a "surface" map (floor only) as well as a "cave" map (floor and ceiling), along with liming up render holes in both to seamlessly move from one to the other. kenshi not having any underground sections really messed me up etc
or like, people talk about "game mechanics" a lot and sometimes it's easy to forget that like, "a menu" is a game mechanic. "moving around space" is a game mechanic. a game that has seamless 3d environments has constructed its "spatial navigation" mechanic differently than a game with 2d tile grids has. so all of the cave rendering stuff is a part of working on how the game presents space to the player. uhhhh we'll see how that goes
anyway like i said in the tumblr post, all that's complicated so i might just draw a bunch of tiles instead. that's easier and looks nicer.
