{"id":2559,"date":"2012-07-02T22:19:27","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T12:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=2559"},"modified":"2012-07-02T23:29:58","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T13:29:58","slug":"subtleties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2012\/07\/02\/subtleties\/","title":{"rendered":"Subtleties"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>So there’s been a lot of stuff going on over the last two weeks.<\/p>\n

The first notable thing is that the “item” code refactoring is now complete.\u00a0 The only thing not working under the new system is the fake old “Punch”, “Kick”, etc. buttons which were displayed when on-foot but not in a logged-in game avatar.\u00a0 And I don’t mind that those buttons aren’t working under the new system, because they never did anything to start with.<\/p>\n

Playing as a logged-in avatar does<\/span> work.\u00a0 (Although the names of their attacks don’t appear on the action bar buttons for some reason.\u00a0 But the tooltips work and they function correctly, so I’m not too fussed over this at the moment)<\/p>\n

Refactoring player AI to the new AI model and subscriber system is almost done.\u00a0 The last thing left to do is movement.\u00a0 Which I may not even do.\u00a0 Currently, everything in the game (except for the player) moves using a single system which is focused around specifying a destination, and then moving toward that destination in a number of small steps.\u00a0 The player, on the other hand, doesn’t set a destination;\u00a0 he sets which direction he wishes to move and how fast each frame.\u00a0 This means that there is separate code for moving an NPC character around than for the real player to move around.\u00a0 Which feels a little odd;\u00a0 the two should really use the same code, just with the real player providing input from keyboard\/controller\/etc, and the AI character providing input from AI code.\u00a0 But having the AI code only need to specify a destination and not the minutiae of motion per frame is pretty convenient.\u00a0 I’ll probably leave this as-is for the moment, and consider it more later on.<\/p>\n

Regardless, I still need to impose the correct class-specified movement speed on the player when logged into an in-game character.\u00a0 Right now, the player uses the same player-speed as normal, instead of the class-speed that AI characters use.<\/p>\n

New in the screenshot above, I’ve added the ability for the procedurally generated models to specify gradients.\u00a0 Right now, I’ve just hardcoded everything to blend lightly toward black at the bottom.\u00a0 When I first looked at it, I thought that this blend was nicely subtle;\u00a0 enough to make things look a little less flat.\u00a0 But after staring at the image for as long as I’ve been typing this post, I’m starting to think that it’s still too strong.\u00a0 Maybe half this amount of blend would be nicely subtle. (<\/em><\/strong>Edit:\u00a0 Yes, half this amount of blend is much better.\u00a0 Happy now.\u00a0 Now I just need to add a little tonal variation.)<\/em><\/p>\n

In other news, I’m now consulting with a UI designer to give me some pokes and prods to solidify the game’s GUI elements.\u00a0 I’m not expecting that to come through any time soon (certainly not in time for the Milestone 2 build), but I’ll probably post some design elements on the site in the near future, to get folks’ reactions.<\/p>\n

Milestone 2 build will be on this coming Sunday, whatever state the game is in.\u00a0 I’ll be posting Win32 and OSX builds.\u00a0 (If anyone’s keenly interested in a Linux build, drop me an e-mail or a comment;\u00a0 while I’ve succeeded at making builds for Linux, I’ve not figured out how to package and distribute one successfully)\u00a0 This will be very much a “shadow technology performance” build; the important feedback I’ll be asking for will be how well the build runs on your computer.<\/p>\n

After a few days and some back and forth with folks, there will probably end up being a couple of different builds, with different settings for the shadow behaviour.\u00a0 But for the initial build, it’ll be the same settings that I’ve been using for the screenshots so far.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So there’s been a lot of stuff going on over the last two weeks. The first notable thing is that the “item” code refactoring is now complete.\u00a0 The only thing not working under the new system is the fake old “Punch”, “Kick”, etc. buttons which were displayed when on-foot but not in a logged-in game…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-Fh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}