102 – Snapshot 2 is going to be great

The theme for snapshot 2 was "RPG", so let's leave that for last. Take a look at this screenshot from the engine:

I should really start cutting out the window border for dramatic effect! Anyway, in this screenshot you can see the new "hub" approach I have taken. The engine has now two centralized states, one meant for exploring the worlds and one for using the tools available in several windows with a traditional mouse  driven interface. You can swap anytime form game mode to system mode by hitting "`" on your keyboard.

When the little menu in the top left corner is visible, you are in system mode. Here you will have access to normal tools, like the world manager which is basically a much more advanced save manager and the game options. Normal things for a game. But you also have access to the engine's constructions set, which is build in seamlessly into the experience. You don't need a separate executable, learn a different tool, wait for loading, push updates or fight a sluggish interface. The tools from the construction set work instantly at any point and the changes are reflected live in the running game. The price to pay for this is minimal, except for the development time :). One note though: when hiding the system hub you will revert back to your loaded game. If no game has been loaded, you are left with an empty screen. Take a look at the screen that greats you when you boot up the engine:

OK, you probably won't have any saved maps. After creating a few you will get this. The purple background signals that no map is loaded. In the future there will be a clearer indication for this. If you load a map you will be placed normally into game and the system hub will disappears. Press "`" and it will be shown again, with all windows in the same state you left them (except for the world manager, which closes by default when loading a map; but if you show it again it will be in the same state as you left it before the close).

The world manager now lets you also give the height in percentage for the newly created maps. By snapshot 002 it will be updated to support entering the world seed too.

Another new comer is the options window. Currently it only supports just the main graphical options and it does not read or save them from disk, so every launch of the engine you have to change the options if you don't like the defaults, but it is a good start. It will be updated soon.

You may also have noticed the skybox. Adding this was done through the material editor, which received a healthy upgrade in functionality.

But before this I added primordial support for modules. Modules describe all the rules and content of the game and are designed with mod-ability in mind. Once the support is rich enough, the era of hardcoding is done for. For the engine to work and look the way it does, you need tot know what materials and meshes to load, what materials to assign to which part of meshes, what meshes to assign to the abstract in-game objects, what physic behavior to assign to them, etc. This was done in the past by hardcoding these relations, but a fully moddable experience needs to add support for creating these relations visually in the construction set and save them as data in a format designed to be easily modded. So now the material editor can add new materials and it also saves them to the main module, which for now is in XML format.

After the editor and and core engine skybox support was added, I was left with a white skybox. Using the material editor, I assigned the textures one by one, seeing the changes reflected live on screen:

I also added night support for the skybox:

I know believe the night is not dark enough.

But the skybox raises a new set of problems. In the past with the sky being a single color and fog having the same color at its maximum intensity, the far clip plane of the terrain was perfectly hidden. Now you can see it and it is rather ugly! My solutions for this: don't look at it. This is very hard to fix and impossible with my current view distance that is very low. So for now I'll ignore it, especially since it will take me months to find a solution for it.

There has been another major change: the engine now uses logical coordinates. In the past I have had many issues with the world scale. I had to change it around several times, a lengthy and error prone process. Now the engine uses logical coordinates and every dimension is expressed in abstract "meters". When going from logical coordinates to real ones, meters are converted to unit-less vertex coordinates at a fixed scale. Every world can have a unique meter size, but once I find the perfect one, all worlds will use the same scale. The scale is a hidden value anyway.

Adding logical coordinates support took me about a day. After adding support, I reduced the scale of the world several orders of magnitude. This had the unfortunate effect of changing subtly the look and feel of the world. Physics behaves differently and fog had its look changed.

So finally let's talk about the RPG elements. I'll write a post about my design for character progression, but for now I added a stamina bar with fairly complex rules to it. You have different rates of gaining and loosing stamina, together with an exhausted state again with its own rates. Governing this stamina bar and your overall mobility is the new skill tree:

Currently it is only a single tree, but the skill points can have drastic effects. 8 of the 9 points are implemented, with the last one being scheduled somewhere in the next few weeks. Instead I'll add further trees.

The progression in the trees is horizontal. The tree has mostly passive abilities, but the passive ones can have such a drastic effect that they will change your active gameplay style. Green outline means a new ability, yellow outline is an upgrade to a previously unlocked green ability and blue outlined abilities are mutually exclusive with another blue outlined ability near by:

This is the build I use during testing. The abilities are 100% implemented and even slightly balanced, but the tooltips are not complete or correct. Since balancing changes every week based on my experience with the ever evolving trees, the tooltips won't be 100% accurate for months. This is a common problem in games, with world of Warcraft being a prime example :P.

The skill tree works closely with a new class added to the engine: the Player class, which manages all stats and attributes and is responsible of spending and gathering resources like stamina. 

Currently the player character is reset to default at each game launch so you'll have to reassign you ability points.

So that's about it for the main features that I manged to squeeze into Snapshot 002. After some more polish and testing, it should be uploaded on Monday.

A fair warning regarding snapshots. At this early stage, save game compatibility is basically 0. Most new snapshots will render your previous saves useless, so a new set of generated worlds for each snapshot is called for.

Changelog:

• Implemented to system hub.
• Implemented primordial module system.
• The world manager can now control the height of generated maps.
• Enhanced material manager: you can add materials and it saves the material list. 
• Basic options menu added.
• Player character class has been added to keep track of the player's status.
• Ability trees have been added. Currently only about half of the mobility tree has been added and implemented.
• Skybox support.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed most of the bugs with changing states in the system hub.
• You can now copy & paste in the engine as you can in any windows application.
• Material editor no longer crashes when loading a non-existing texture.