Skip to main content

Item's Icons

"What is that ugly mess?"
Well, it's a test for a dynamically colored set of items.
The original icons were taken from here, a great source of black and white game icons. Very useful if you're planning your project and need some stand it art.

The red channel is the grayscale image, the green channel holds a mask for non metallic, non-colored sections, like rope or bare leather. The blue channel holds a mask for dynamic colors.

The masked areas can have their input adjusted by a three channel input (RGB) from a material, to control hue, saturation and value. This gives a wide array of different colors meaning that no two items generated by the item generation script should look identical.

Here's what they look like when passed through the shader:


Ok, still a bit of an ugly mess... I think I need to start with better material than a faked hightmap from a 2 bit image. :)

Honestly, I think 2d art is my worst area. I'm probably just going to move on and come back to this part when the game is nearly done.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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.

Dynamic terrain in GODOT

Long time no posts. I haven't been keeping up with the projects I started. At first it seems fun and exciting, but I always run in to limitations in the setup, plus the grind of just making stuff without any real challenges... It ends up being something that I don't want to commit to. So right now I'm just messing around with some ideas and see what comes out. No commitment to a bigger project, just some time to try new things. This week I've been working on procedurally generated terrain.  In the past, there were some big limitations on how I approached this, because the game world had to have the whole map, from the micro to the macro. I had to choose a scale somewhere between, which meant I couldn't have really large maps, or really small details. I think I've found a way around that. Below you can see two types of map data coexisting on top of each other. The wireframe is the collision data, used for physics and for clicking on the map, to move characters ar