Looking Back

So, the last two weeks have flown by. First I have had some mental/physical health issues which stopped me in my tracks. I thought I was resistant to stress when working on something I love. I was mistaken. Stress-induced panic attacks are not fun. 0/10, would not do again. Luckily, I had a few days of vacation planned already just after breaking down. This week I had to start slow to keep the pressure low. Now I should be back in full swing.

As for the interesting part, I was still able to implement some good stuff. Object placement is now in a solid state, with spawning locations finally being consistent, correct and efficiently queryable. Consequently, players will not spawn below the terrain geometry, anymore.

I have also made some fixes to the player representation. Movement is much smoother, the player character now has an actually updated physical volume and cannot move through walls anymore… Additionally, character animations are now unified, which also affected NPCs. See the following, short video:

Compare that to the last video to see the small but significant progress.

As a last improvement, NPCs now have latent survival tasks. Finding and consuming food already works, albeit in a rather rudimentary fashion.

Looking Forward

Next week I want to make another iteration on the terrain. Running the game on a weaker machine is barely watchable. I will try to simplify geometry and retain detail using shaders. If time permits, I will also implement continuous terrain loading. In effect, this means that only the immediate surroundings of the player need to be loaded, while all other geometry can be replaced with simplified representations for pathfinding purposes.

This is a deviation from my plan to work straight towards an MVP. However, since I would like some testing feedback, I need to provide testing versions which actually run on medium performance machines.

Thanks for reading and until next week!