75 – Diversity

It's time for Snapshot 5! I was not happy with the way the last video turned out. That makes sense since it was an early preview, but still... I focused the rest of the dev time to make block interaction better. And I love the consequences the floor/wall merger had on the structure of the world and the way you interact with it. I foresee some small problems with shallow streams, but I'll fix those when they arise.

I went ahead and properly implemented this merger, getting rid of all floor interactions in the game and replacing them with wall interactions. You need to do something with a floor? Modify either the block bellow your feet or the surface information for that block. This is done automatically so you don't need to switch current Z levels. Fixing all the bugs that came after this merger took a lot of time and was fairly frustrating.

I went back and redone the border system. You saw the border system a long time ago, but then it was just a prototype secluded to the engine, without interacting with the "real" world of the game. Back then I used a fairly basic hack and had hardcoded variants for the floor textures with baked in borders. So since a face can have up to four borders, I needed 16 different textures. This time I only have a texture and I am blending the borders onto them on the fly as they are needed. With the new system I can blend anything on top of a texture as I am rendering it. So in the future expect to see small icons and other helpers on top of you blocks. The hest part is that the blending occurs at render stage and can be placed on top of any texture without the need to create a new one, so it is very efficient memory wise. I got rid of over 9 MiBs of PNG textures this way, so Snapshot 5 is going to be light and breezy. Going commando can do that to you.

To make the picture complete, I started making the final implementation for multiple level rendering. By default you get your current level and the one bellow rendered. Actually, you get N levels bellow and optionally N above, but for Snapshot 5 I am sticking with N = 1. This is the way I'm doing snapshots, gradually easing both you and the engine into the full set of features as they are developed. You can change levels again with keys ',' and '.'. When looking at your keyboard, don't look for ',' and '.'. Look for '<' and '>'. This way you'll find it easy to remember which keys to use and what they do. Pressing 'L' togles the rendering of the above levels. Default is off. 

The new levels have a higher polygon count so this lowers performance. Blending probably is also slower. Using fewer textures and thus context switches raises the performance. But without taking all these into consideration, terrain rendering should still be 8 times faster now. Terrain is only a small portion of the entire world and items eat up a lot more resources, but this still should gibe you 10-30 extra FPS. The factor of 8 is only for Snapshot 5, it will probably decrease to 2 or 4 as I start doing fancier stuff with the terrain.

I also did major code cleanup. Over the months a lot of crab accumulated in the 3D side of the code. I got rid of about 2000 lines of code and I should be able to get rid of another 2000 lines as soon as I am sure that they are not needed. I isolated terrain into its own class with a pleasant interface.

So putting all this together, we got this:

Snapshot 5 marks the one moth anniversary of Dwarves & Holes! Happy anniversary! It has been a good month.The change from Snapshot 1 to Snapshot 5 is substantial. This would make a proper first tech demo.

Also take a look at this picture:

Nothing special! Just ye good old barrel. But not everybody makes such barrels. Some like to make them more accessible:

Some crafters still like them accessible, but don't want the pets having access to it, so they place a heavy block on top of it:

(The small black rectangle hides a popup from my contact list than accidentally made it into the screenshot)

In some regions of the world, barrels are put on their side. To prevent them rolling away, the quickest solution is to place two heavy blocks on each side:

I you have time, you can create two carved out support pieces for it:

Or even create a barrel stand for optimal balance and stability:

I want such item diversity for everything. Right now it is not used for anything. Maybe I'll make Snapshot 5 pick one at random. But in the future I might assign them to geographic regions, so a new immigrant might come with a new way of making things. Some dwarves might like the new design. Some won't. Crafting blueprints will be exchanged and passional wars will be fought!

These are completely random and premature musings, but if at some point in the distant future Dwarves & Holes becomes a massive financial success, I would like to hire somebody to make all models and textures procedural so you won't get twice in a row an identical looking world. That would be crazy and a first I think!

I'll take a small break so Snapshot 6 will be light on new features. I want to playtest and bugfix. I want to model a basic armor stand and weapon's rack. Actually, I want mannequins, not armor stands, but armor stands are easier to model for now. Maybe I'll make it render a higher number of levels. Oh, and I have a budget right now so I'll be hitting my contact list hard over the head to try to find a (preferably) local payed modeller/texturer. This is going to be hard. Not because of the money. Finding a (semi) freelancer for such tasks who is both skilled and responsible is almost impossible. Such persons usually have a stable job and are not interested/have no time for side projects. And the ones who have time are usually jobless, desperate and lacking both on the skill side and the knowledge and experience side for the very special needs of modeling for a low poly 3D game. Your 30000 polygon bed might look great in Blender/3D Max, but it will blow my game up when I put tens of thousands in the same scene and you probably got some normals wrong. So probably I won't find anybody, but still I'll try.

If everything goes fine, Snapshot 5 should be up on IndieDB tomorrow.