Skip to main content

Concept: Footprints.

Today I did some work to try to improve the single texture graphics mode. It's already looking much better, The character shadows follow the nearest light source which makes them look very real.

I did some other experiments which didn't work out, and I also did some work on footprints.

I've done footprints before with a different game and there are two approaches, one is just a basic approximation, adding footprints space the player moves and orienting them towards the last square they came from. The other way needs me to get data from the player's skeleton and can place footprints very realistically but it does make things much more complex and over complexity is something I want to avoid if I can.



I tried it out, walking around the map for about 15 minutes, leaving a trail of little black footprints all over the place. It didn't slow down the game at all. It's a nice effect, though I may make them a little bit more transparent, It shows you quite quickly where you've been, and also where monsters have been. If you wandered in to a new area of the map and found lots of footprints on the ground you could expect that a group of wandering monsters is nearby. If you see some footprints avoiding some tiles for no reason, you might have discovered a trap!

They would be very useful indeed if you've chosen to play without an in game map. Kind of a trail of breadcrumbs. The only problem I can see is that they would rather build up over time, and if you did a lot of backtracking the whole map would soon be full. Also if you leave a level and then come back, all the footprints will have to be saved and loaded again, which seems a bit much.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra...

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.

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...