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.

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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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