My Summer Project

[NightrainSrt4]

Thanks. Ultimately it depends on what the final product is, but if it is good I might try and sell it. Submit it to steam, etc. That is a long way off though. If I can complete it by next years deadline, then submit it to Microsoft's DreamBuildPlay Contest. I would just have to convert the pointer to something a joystick could handle and it should be set for xbox.

If I don't sell it, you all can have copies / play it. If I do sell it I'm going to need playtesters! But that is all a long way off. Still have a lot of basic things left to do before it is any more than a dig / place block sandbox with random terrain / caves.

[NightrainSrt4]

Todays work, with better video quality. Youtube has a 720p version which looks better. The aspect ratio got screwed on the lower resolution videos for whatever reason.



Continued working on the dynamic terrain. Still some corner cases to be dealt with and several missing textures on inside corners and such.

The water now determines how high to draw itself depending on the amount of water in the tile. This works much better than before where any amount of water greater than the minimum value would trigger a full block draw. This acts more natural.

I do have to switch the rendering of the water to the layer behind the other tiles. That way I can draw draw the water a bit wider so it fills those corner gaps.

[billygoat333]

that is looking much much better... the water looks more like water! lol

[SXRguyinMA]

looking good!

[NightrainSrt4]

Thanks. I've added another layer behind the tile layer that places a block with the water texture based on the height of the water around it behind the solid blocks.

What that means is that now the water correctly renders in the alpha space of the solid blocks around it. No more straight alpha/white water edges on those parts.

I don't think I showed it on the video but when you cut into a bottom left/right corner filled with water it shows two corner tiles which give the appearance of a path for water to run, but because they are solid they block any water from passing. I've added code to handle that, so the water now pours through those "holes", and does so while maintaining the correct mass of the pool. This is important because my first implementation was creating infinite water. Now the mass is conserved.

I'll get a video up later today showing what I mean a bit better.

Edit: The player now renders behind the water with an alpha blend applied. This makes the player look as though they are in the body of water instead of standing in front of it.

[Collinstheclown]

Had to load it on my phone, since youtube is blocked at work.

It looks awesome so far! That water is natural looking! I like how gravity actually tries to level out the water.

Notch should hire you to do the water in Minecraft... It's horrible compared to this. Seriously, it's bad.

If you ever get to the point, I'd love to be a play tester!

[NightrainSrt4]

Thanks. I put right around three days of work into it to get it how it is now (the water). I wouldn't have spent that long, and it was between other things too, but I wanted to get it to work a little more naturally. I'm still limited by the sets of algorithms used, but I wanted it to at the very least display based on mass/volume of the cell, spread at as close to a natural rate as I could while bleeding mass when there wasn't enough water in the cell, and for it to level itself out when you dig out to the side and up.

In both Minecraft and Terraria if you go down to the bottom of the water then dig to the side, and then above your head, there is an air pocket there. While that is cool, I thought it would be nice if the water filled in that hole slowly until it reached its leveling point. You can still dig out and up and outrun the water a bit due to the speed of the algorithm filling the cell, but it will fill itself up soon after.

What I've Done Since Then:

*Added a basic menu system in

*Threaded the Save, so you can visually see progress and/or animation as its saving.

*I had backloaded some of the work into the save to speed up load times, but I had gone a bit too far. I put some things back into the load as doing so only increase load times a fraction of a second, but shaved the save time by more than 15 seconds. This was on a 2 million+ block world.

*Mined blocks now spawn the corresponding item.

*Items despawn when the player touches them.
----Going to add aggro range so the player doesn't have to physically touch the item.
----Working inventory system now, so before they despawn they get added to inventory if there is space. If not, they don't despawn and you don't pick them up.
----Need to add a decay timer, so blocks don't sit in the world forever.
----Actually, they don't do that currently either. They despawn forever once you quit the game, or load another map/zone. A decay timer would still be nice.

[NightrainSrt4]

Today I added:

*Base User Interface and player Inventory Screen draws
*Switching between maps, world map to dungeon, dungeon to world map, working
*Quite a bit of refactoring. More to be done once more base concepts get implemented.

[DynamoNED]

Looks good! If you need playtesters or just want to give it away if you don't sell, let me know!

[NightrainSrt4]

Haha. When that time comes I will keep all of you here at TBCS in mind. Thanks for the support.

Today I'm going to be fleshing out the inventory system.