Infantry experiements.

Vehicles are working nicely now, and I think the vehicular game-play is coming to a point where I'm pretty happy with it. You can see some of the more recent progress here.

Now with tanks churning their way through the mud, I think it's time to start bringing in the PBIs.

Poor Bloody Infantry.

I need to see how infantry reacts to vehicles, how well (or badly) my pathfinding routine works with large numbers of agents and vehicles. And overall how infantry works out in the game. I think the plan I have is going to work quite well. Infantry move very slowly, so the pathfinding calculations shouldn't happen very often. The pathfinding itself is very rudimentary, just like that I'm using for the vehicles at the moment so the overhead should be small.

I've actually got a whole load of infantry building scripts and models left over from an earlier version of the game, but I'd like to start from scratch on that one really. I'm experimenting with quick hand drawn textures and low poly models, so far it doesn't look too bad. Remember, the infantry sprites are going to be tiny on screen...

Right now I'm considering if it's worth the extra time to paint these guys up using a more complex texture painting technique, the final result is so small I don't know if you'd really see any benefits. Maybe tomorrow I'll post a side by side comparison. For now I'll probably use some of my old assets, I've got two different riflemen sprites:

And you can see what they look like walking around in this video.

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Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us...

The basics of A Star Pathfinding

Someone wanted to know how the code works for basic A* path-finding. Rather than reply in Facebook, I've made a quick post for it here. 1. create an array of nodes to represent your level. It can be nodes with connections, or it can be a list of co-ordinates where connections are assumed to be NESW where a node exists. Example 1: level = {"001":[["002", 5.0], ["003", 5.0]], "002":[["001", 5.0], ["003", 5.0]], "003":[["002", 5.0], ["001", 5.0]]} This is a dictionary based "mesh" type array, for easy reading. You can see it has 3 nodes arranged in a triangle. Each node is connected to two others, and in this case, the distance between each is 5.0 units. It's easy to see how this mesh could be expanded. You just need more points. Each point must include its two neighbors and the distance between them. Example 2: level = [[0,1,1,0], [0,0,1,1], [1,1,1,0], [1,0,0,0...

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