Starting work on the user interface.

I've finally had some time to spend on coding so I've moved forward with player movement and added the beginning of a player UI.
Right now you can see the player's health bar and status light, showing who is selected and who has movement points or actions still to perform. These are going to be essential for the next stage, the beginning of combat.

I've learned a lot about tile set design too, notably not to make the door recesses too deep, as it makes it hard to find characters or objects which are in a doorway.

I've also worked on camera control so you can tilt the camera in to an overhead view to get a really classic roleplaying game feel.

I reworked footprints so they are dependent on player actions, they will look much more natural now. You can see the new version in the video:

You can see the health bar shows fortitude, focus and stamina in yellow, cyan and magenta colors. Having three main types of health bar will not be strange to elder scrolls players, and these are somewhat similar.

However focus is not just for magic, but also for combat and ranged weapons use. I don't want to make it too difficult to regain focus because doing so can make magic users pretty useless (as in the ender scrolls 3 Morrowind). However, I don't want to make it too easy to cast a lot of spells as this is a low magic setting. Spells are going to be very useful, but perhaps not all that common.

Comments

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 A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms.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...

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