Speed Improvements Again.

I've already gained some speed improvements from how I'm handling dynamic blocking objects, but I wanted to revisit some of my older code and see if I could clean it up a bit.

One of the things I was doing before to make faster calculations was to strip the A star graph down to a bounding box around the start and end + a small border. Actually this turned out to be slowing the code down once I reorganized things. The only time this would speed things up is if the map were really huge, the start and end locations were really far apart and every room on the map was open... So this got dropped for now.

I was doing some esoteric things with getting the nearest node in the graph for a start and end point, which was almost taking longer than the A star search (on short routes)! So that got cleaned up. The route smoothing pass cleans that up anyway.

Here's the end results for comparison:

Almost a 50% reduction in some cases. It may not seem important but once there are multiple units in game starting to pathfind around the map, a 50% reduction in time taken to calculate paths is going to be quite a big deal.

It now looks like the code is ready to move forward again.

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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

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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.

Make your game models POP with fake rim lighting.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho

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