Long time without a blog update. People got tired of me posting on social media, so time to do an update. It’s kind of hard to summarize what’s happened since the project started back up after working on someone else’s game for a bit. Basically I wrote, modeled, painted, etc much closer to an alpha release. On the project alpha means feature complete without polish for all major and most minor features.
Going on an Adventure?
This month is special as the project is back in full swing now with commits and bug fixes doubled the previous month! Also a lot of design work and finalizing the world building at the same time. It’s really good to get 5+ features in a day, and special when you get about a whole month of that. I’ll try to hit some highlights over this month skimming commit notes:
- Terrain tweaks from material blending to shape/scale at generation controlled by seed value
- UI/UX overhaul; All new widget toolkit written in house with advanced windowing and event support
- Tons of new widgets and panels; theming support as well
- All the old UI was converted over and it was easy to add many new ‘windows’ such as the trader menu quickly
- I was shocked to learn the TTS system still worked for NPC dialogs
Testing new local lights, ignore the bad normals in my sponza test model
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Major lighting pass
- New punctual lights: oren-nayar + quality focused GGX, microshadows in composition, and atten handles singularity (no IES)
- light flicker system handles temperature as well as light area with ‘smart’ phasing to avoid syncs globally and locally
- Moon phase is controlled by dayOfMonth in worldtime for both direct lighting and VFX of the moon
- Reuse data shared between punctual lights to avoid use of gobjs to do offsets on point lights for props
- Dynamic control of direct lighting from sun/moon better exposed to script for use with weather mods
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Reworked all the starter class/origin/backgrounds
- Special hardcore mode origin you start the game with just underpants
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Character creation overhaul has some throw backs to old CRPGs, but modern features like fast to get in network play
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World creation system has UI finally
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Replaced the stand-in character and world save system with a new fully featured system
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New features for easier to write script events for me and modders
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New spell/weapon/equipment system
- Database entries can basically contain DSL for scripting hooks and init values now
- Generic behaviors that can be used by database this way to make all new items quickly
- For example making an orb you can throw and specific damage, and auto recall is just a line of text
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New spell designs to match world building
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Body parts updates
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Editor love:
- Mode to recover writing UI while in the game and you break script
- Smart handling of state of mouse lock and imgui based editor active state
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New assets and models such as fabrics, clothing, items, trees, etc
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Fixes for crafting, inventory, construction, etc
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Headgear fixes related to savegames
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Magic item redesign
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Tools with additional error checking and reporting with help (mods)
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Looting system updates
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Yes, finally disabled the ‘yellow line to the sky’ debug marker
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Other stuff that’s not as user facing