It’s potatoes. This is a Polish rock.
Ok, it’s not a Polish rock. It’s a normal rock. And it took like 45 seconds to model, so I tried to do something a little humorous to break up the monotony of posting a picture of a virtual rock. I hope no one is offended. This is rock001. Which means I can make 998 more individual rock models of this same amazing quality before I need to change my asset naming scheme, so get ready.
Month: February 2018
Penrith Tower
Asset SpotlightHoly moly! So freakin’ spooky!
Oooooooooooooohhhhh!!! (ghosty noises)
Ok, so no one’s shaking in his boots over this one (yet) but I’m pleased with the progress so far. It needs a good bit more work but this is a nice starting point. As of right now, this tower has no planned purpose in the plot of the game. It might be nice if players had the ability to look out of the windows. Like, the inside isn’t modeled but if you interact with the door you can say “climb the tower” and then the game camera is just place in front of the top windows so the player can look at the glory of Penrith Forest. Or maybe the tower will actually have some significance. Who knows.
Assets for Penrith Forest
Planning and DevelopmentHere’s a free form jazz-fusion style list of things I think would help make Penrith Forest more interesting:
- A well – random wells are always fun
- A spooky tower – some spooky stuff went down there
- Rocks
- More tree variety
- Grass
- Bushes
- A stable behind the farmhouse
- Etc., etc., etc.
I’ve also decided what the game’s very first quest will be! This will probably change, but I think it works for now, but I don’t want to give it away just yet, so I’ll post about that soon.
Small multiplayer improvement
Feature DevelopmentI’ve changed all players to the same default character from the gray sphere. I also implemented tracking rotation changes in addition to position, so when another player rotates you can see it. Here’s three tiny browsers running side by side:
Bask in the glory of very basic multiplayer support
It’s a little confusing because every player looks the same, but take my word for it that those three guys are running around independently, just as happy as clams wearing green shirts and blue pants.
The polling time is still very long (1/2 a second) but I’m going to leave it that way for now because I would like to implement optimizations that don’t rely on short polling times, and I’m afraid that if I shorten it now I’ll forget about that.
Basic multiplayer
Feature DevelopmentWell that was a little faster than I thought. Here’s a screenshot of my very, very basic multiplayer support in action:
That’s two browsers running the game side by side. For now, your player is represented by my nifty character model, and any other players are a gray sphere. So you can see in this screenshot that in the game on the left the sphere is where the player is in the game on the right, and vice versa. As each moves around it’s updated in real time on all other clients. My polling time is set at 1 second right now, so the server only sends out an update once per second and the movement is very jumpy, but there are ways to improve that, the simplest of which is to simply decrease the polling period.
Using socket.io and node this was almost disturbingly easy. It took me a bit to get my head wrapped around the concepts, but overall this is a very simple thing to do with these tools. I also relied pretty heavily on a series of tutorials made by the guy who made Raining Chain. The tutorials were very helpful, and the game itself is also quite entertaining, so if you’ve never played it, go check it out.
Still many things to do, but it’s exciting to get basic multiplayer support added so quickly and easily.
Penrith Gate
Asset SpotlightHere’s a basic mock up of the gate that separates Penrith Forest from the rest of Lyridia.
The character is only there for reference, of course. This gate needs quite a bit of work but this is a starting point.
Development schedule, 2018.02.01
Planning and DevelopmentNext steps for Chronicles of Tright: Lyridia
- Basic multiplayer support
- This will only include the ability to see other players roaming around on the current map
- Better camera controls
- Right now the camera just stays behind the player. I need to add the ability to move the camera around the player and change the pitch to look up or down. Zooming also needs to be improved so that when you zoom all the way in the controls turn into first person. Also, the camera needs to automatically zoom so that the view of the player won’t be blocked by objects in the scene. This will also prevent players from seeing the inside of assets or the under side of the terrain.
- Jumping
- The entire movement system really needs to be re-written. It works now but is very jerky sometimes. Adding the ability for players to jump may require this, but I don’t know right now.
- Continue improving Penrith Forest
- The area needs more plants, the farmhouse needs to be improved, and I need to add a gatehouse at the exit so that players are prevented from leaving until they finish the tutorial quests. Once the tutorial quests are done, the player can use the gatehouse as a transition point to the rest of the world.
There are many, many more things to get done, but this is a decent list to try and finish during the first few weeks of February. Once all of these are done, I’ll publish the very first version of the game. You won’t be able to really do anything but walk around Penrith Forest, and you’ll be trapped there, but with the features listed above in place I think I’ll be willing to call it a very early alpha version of the game.