realmsoffantasyadmin featured, user interface, world building

Smoothing and Screen Sizes

Wow that has to be the dullest title of one of my blog posts yet.

I’ve actually had to do quite a bit of really quite dull stuff on the game over the last month or so. It all started one hot late summer day when I decided to add in the gathering nodes since the first dungeon was kinda finished.

I’ve added yet another editor that allows me to place little sparkling gathering nodes in bushes or grass or on tress or rocks (for gathering plants, wood, rocks/ore).

So here’s how gathering works:

  1. Have the skill (you have 3 basic one’s by default).
  2. Have the appropriate tool. This will allow you to see sparkling points where you can gather items from.
  3. Find a sparkling “node” and then press collect.
  4. The guy will then gather a random amount and rarity of items from the node and it will disappear.

 

 

Like so.

So that works nicely. The nodes reappear after a while but only if you go away for a randomly amount of time and a random distance. I may make them randomly spawn a different spots too but later.

Ok so gathering works nicely now and as you can see from the right screenshot the bottom right now contains notifications of when you collect something and also when you get an increase to your skills. I’m going to reuse that a bit for other things. They slide on nicely, stack up, then fade away.. I kinda of borrowed that idea from another game but maybe I’d better not say this time. I think the effect is nice anyway.

And now onto a bit of a side track which I wasn’t supposed to be going down: FXAA. For those of you who don’t know what that is. It Anti-Aliasing or just basically making the image look a bit smoother by slightly blurring areas where there are jagged lines and it’s easy to see the pixels. That’s a very basic descript but I won’t bore you with the technical details. If you’re interested, it was invented by a guy at NVDIA and is used in many modern games since it doesn’t slow the game down much and produces a nice improvement. What is FXAA?

Ok so that calls for a before and after:

 

 

 

It really make a nice difference where there’s a large contrast between the sky and landscape (although that will be further improved by post-processing distance fog later on as well). But it also makes the edges of leaves of trees, rocks etc all look a little more smooth. It’s the illusion of more pixels basically.

The game now handles various screen resolutions all the way down to 1024 and up to 1920. For some of this it was a simple transformation matrix but for other screens ie pretty much user interface screen there is (merchant, skill trainer, innkeeper, quest npc, quest reward etc etc etc) I had to make it centre itself based on the selected size and even resize itself and use a smaller font in some cases. This was a rather dull and massive undertaking but it was necessary of course and allowed me the opportunity to tidy up the UI code.

All that tidying and screen size stuff has made it so I can now easily design my new and hopefully final user interface screens:

  • Skills – Picture and detailed description of all the skills the player knows
  • Recipes – Everything the player knows how to make along with things they have an idea about but have not completely learned yet (Atelier style).
  • Crafting – A two-step process of selecting the item you want to make from a list (showing what ingredients are required and you success chance along with the final result). The 2nd step is to select ingredients (quality and amounts) and press craft and either end up with the item or not.

 

Ok so that’s what I’m working on next.

I’ve also made a story tree (Like Detroit: Become Human) for my actual story so the player can go down various story paths for different endings. Some actions are good, evil, some just effect where the story is going.

I also did some more world building design to fill in some of the empty areas which I’ll be doing shortly.. the world is just so damn big!

Until next time…

realmsoffantasyadmin enemies, featured, world building

Dungeon Finished and Back in the Sun

Ok where to start?

Right so last entry was me starting to create a large interior for the first time which was a “starter dungeon”.

So for that I needed to make larger wall sections I could slot together (rather than placing each small segment of wall which would have taken forever. I made L shapes and various lengths of straight wall for this purpose. Also needed was floor tiles, rubble, cobwebs, a tweak to the particle system to make the ground fog use the light color it was near.

catacombs3.png

catacombsmap.png

I then had to finish off the basic collision detection so you couldn’t just walk through alls and objects. This was obviously a fairly huge undertaking but at least it’s now done at works across the whole game for any object.

I made a basic collider object which I could then use place invisible barriers around things I didn’t want you to be able to walk through. So I don’t waffle on about this too much you can just watch these little clips which show you how works. I had to make the camera also an object so you can’t spin it around and see through walls. It simply zooms in to the player until it’s no longer behind the wall anymore. It slowly checks to see if it can zoom back out to the default zoom now and again.

 

Next up I needed monsters for the dungeons. Now these were a little different from the rats, goblins and wolves outside since they couldn’t really use bounding boxes and had to be able to walk around objects to chase you and also give up if they were too far away.

The AI for this was fairly complex but fun to code and again will be really useful in later parts of the game where I can make monsters even more clever.

Below if the dungeon boss room which contains a particularly intelligent zombie (intelligence is relative).

dungeonboss

Obviously these monster and the dungeon itself had to have treasure in it or whats the point in risking it?

So now I needed a treasure chest editor…

treasureeditor

(Also added a particle effect for the bigger chests to sparkle but let’s not go too deeply into everything I added).

Oh and one final thing I completely forgot about initially was the map. The map was for outside. So i took an aerial view of the dungeon and then ran it through various filters to make it look like old parchment. It’s not bad and will do for now.

s I_Ancient_Ruins_mini.png

Ok so that’s the dungeon finally finished. In theory the next one can be bigger and better and won’t take me 2 months to do – especially since I won’t have to make a treasure editors and do the collision detection.

Right so finally back outside we have gathering. This needed a new editor and particle effect.

Here’s a short video of this. You can’t actually gather yet but I can attached a gathering node (mining, gathering and woodcutting – for now) but the nodes exist and can have items added to them with a range of how many items you can get, their types and rarity.

So I’ll leave you with a final video of the beginnings of that…

So next up.. finish gathering so you can actually.. err.. gather and think about crafting a little?

Also I really need to fix transitional animation soon since it’s really bugging me.

Until next time…