Project Lemonade November Update

It's been a while since posted here. I've moved from Blender Game Engine to GODOT, and I've started a new project.

The proposal for Project Lemonade is in an earlier blog post, so I won't go back to talking about that.

Here's a quick overview:

~~Solar city~~ (Project Lemonade) will be a non-violent game designed with the intent of making people think about ways to regenerate their communities in case of coming social breakdown. It is inspired by Solarpunk.

I haven't made massive progress yet, because I've had to learn a whole new game engine. However, I have already taken some steps towards a working prototype. I've got a controllable character in the game, plus a working tileset system (GODOT has a great tileset feature), and also some simple AI agents, just wandering around for now.

It's not very impressive yet, (all the assets are placeholders, just while working on functionality) but it feels great to have finally moved on from the BGE and to be trying new stuff. Ever since they announced that the game engine would be cut in Blender 2.80, I've been trying to decide what to do next.

My friend Jacob Merril has been doing great work on making UPBGE compatible with Blender 2.8, and there's a couple of other game engines which are being integrated... but they all lack something which GODOT has, which is cross platform access. I can make a GODOT game which runs natively on the web, and have it connected with the same game running in Android.

The idea of creating a cross platform asynchronous multi-player environment is really an appealing part of this project.

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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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