Infantry experiements.

Vehicles are working nicely now, and I think the vehicular game-play is coming to a point where I'm pretty happy with it. You can see some of the more recent progress here.

Now with tanks churning their way through the mud, I think it's time to start bringing in the PBIs.

Poor Bloody Infantry.

I need to see how infantry reacts to vehicles, how well (or badly) my pathfinding routine works with large numbers of agents and vehicles. And overall how infantry works out in the game. I think the plan I have is going to work quite well. Infantry move very slowly, so the pathfinding calculations shouldn't happen very often. The pathfinding itself is very rudimentary, just like that I'm using for the vehicles at the moment so the overhead should be small.

I've actually got a whole load of infantry building scripts and models left over from an earlier version of the game, but I'd like to start from scratch on that one really. I'm experimenting with quick hand drawn textures and low poly models, so far it doesn't look too bad. Remember, the infantry sprites are going to be tiny on screen...

Right now I'm considering if it's worth the extra time to paint these guys up using a more complex texture painting technique, the final result is so small I don't know if you'd really see any benefits. Maybe tomorrow I'll post a side by side comparison. For now I'll probably use some of my old assets, I've got two different riflemen sprites:

And you can see what they look like walking around in this video.

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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

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.

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra

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