Weekly Roundup
This week was a Nightships week! Much was accomplished for the interior environment. As I don’t have access to my computer from this week while I write this, I’ll simply be linking to the tweets where I posted these prototype gifs.
I started last week working on performance optimizations for the interior-simulation, swapping from a parallax simulation (resizing and moving the planets around a stationary ship) to a viewportframe based one, creation a lower-quality galaxy in the viewportframe and then placing it on a part projected outside the ship. The part moved dynamically as the player camera moved. Overall it doesn’t look nearly as nice, but it runs much better, taking the FPS of a moving ship from 15-20 all the way back to 60. Here it is in action!
I spent the next few days working on providing more and more functionality to the interior environment, such as getting the elevator and chairs to work.
Elevator:
Chairs:
After I spent some time on the inside, I tackled the task of connecting the ship editor to the overall game. Allowing for a player to change their ship, then have that change show on the live ship. Around the time I was working on this, there were some mysterious performance problems that prevented me from posting a gif, so I just posted a still-image of the ship in the newly unveiled Space Dock created by @gbug for the game.
I ended the week on a bit of a flat note, with the autopilot not working as intended. This is unfortunate, as I was hoping to get Nightships in a playable format by Saturday for testers. Due to it taking longer than expected I’ll be devoting a bit of time next week to finishing that up.
Next Week
Next week I have 3 main goals:
- Re-open Nightships to testers before Wednesday
- Begin working on Super Hero Life IV again.
- Make another attempt at fixing Super Hero Life III’s data loss problems, recoding the entire save system if I have to.
I am uncertain currently as to if I’ll focus on finishing the city map first, or if I’ll begin working on the character editor, or if I might even begin working on some of the combat system. I might just jump between these options until one of them gains some creative momentum.
Talk to y’all then!