#godot

[eccentric-nucleus]

item drops! continuing the trend of copying the elden ring ui, when you pick something up it goes into a little list on the right side of the screen. making the pillar glow effect stay upright even when attached to a rotating physics boy was more complicated than i would like & there's probably a way to do it better -- it can't just be a child of the rigid body b/c then it inherits rotations, and setting a RemoteTransform3D didn't keep it actually aligned with the drop orb for some reason, so i ended up having to make a custom script file just for that

[erytau]

Just kinda pleased with how this whole (secret) tower looks

[eccentric-nucleus]

adding item pickup blobs. at first i had the render model be disconnected from the physics object, so the physics object fell leaving the model floating in midair, and then once i fixed that, since they were sphere physics objects, they fell and rolled away from me super fast

[cursed-cafe]

[All of a sudden, the Magic Mirror starts going haywire as the glass starts to glow with a strange light.]

"Helloooooo, Cursed Cafe. I hope I'm not interrupting you during your peak business hours. No, wait...I hope I am."

"Wh-what is this now? How did you know to reach us like this?"

"You.....you're the Lightbringer, aren't you? Powah Broker!"

"I'm flattered that you were able to tell. But I'm afraid flattery will get you nowhere, Ultimate Maid."

"Hey Powah Broker, what the hell are you playing at here?"

"After you stopped the Shredder for making the magic-laced Mutagen I'd requested of him, I'd think you'd know the answer to that. In particular, I want to address the Ultimate Maid here."

"Huh? Why me?"

"Don't think I'm not one to see through a ruse. You've made yourself out to be more passive and helpless than you really are, but I know there is much you have been holding back."

"I don't see how that's any of your business."

"It's my business because you have been imposing upon my business! Your all smiles service, moral support, and careful tending to this place have been instrumental in bringing villains here to purchase magic drinks from you, even when they could be out in the City purchasing similarly powerful conveniences from me."

"So that's what this call is really about? You're freaking jealous?"

"I'm the guy who makes the stuff that gets sold here! If you want to blame someone, blame me and leave Akane out of your shit!"

"Actually, I was next hoping to speak to the people who run the market in the back. Would you be so kind as to bring them out?"

[eccentric-nucleus]

okay and it still runs fine on a 13x13 chunk map with 8192 plants per chunk (= 1,384,448 total plants) with no hitching or stuttering. i should probably put in a framerate counter at some point. obviously this is still easy mode since the update function is trivial and the 'plant model' is a cube & i'm not doing anything else in the game like pathfinding or, you know, waterflow calculations, but this is at least a good sign that i'm not doing anything critically inefficient

those godot tutorials talking about animating thousands of fishes or shooting 10,000 bullets or w/e kind of worried me b/c actually i was thinking of rendering roughly an order of magnitude or two more things than that, but i'm glad it's held up so well so far!

(i think i'm leaning towards 25x25 maps being the 'final' map size b/c i just want to see what 'double the size of the wildmender map' is like. but i haven't actually tested with anything over 13x13 so it could definitely start chugging at some point)

[eccentric-nucleus]

added random rotations to the plants, but not before messing up a transform and making everything float. also now i have one (1) separate plant 'species' with different growth data.

theoretically i could align these with the normal of the terrain they're on, but plants kind of famously line themselves up heliotropically so they should really all be pointing up regardless

[eccentric-nucleus]

and this is with 73728 plants rendered and performance is unchanged. that's good! not exactly sure how to think about lods for these. presumably past a certain distance i'd cull all the small ones, but i'm still not really thinking about lods right now

(also these plants are currently 'growing' b/c i cycle through and update a chunk every half-second, which also writes new growth values etc to the instance mesh. i imagine this might get more dicey if/when there's any real plant logic b/c then it would require sampling and averaging all the nearby terrain data and doing potentially-complex logic to them)

the problem i'm envisioning though is how to interact with the plants. ideally it should be like, you get close to a plant and it gets outlined or smth and a little hovering infobox appears over it with certain plant information. but that requires: knowing when you're approaching a plant. these things aren't Nodes in the scene tree or w/e, they're just a big dict array of PlantInstance objects in the chunk with positions specified in the multimesh instances. so i can't (and shouldn't) add 70k, like, Area3D proximity checks or w/e to the scene tree. but i should figure out some way of doing something like that, b/c interaction is kind of important

[eccentric-nucleus]

:toot:

in-shader parametric blending based on growth state

now i gotta make up some different params for different 'species' and also add a second parameter (like, say, 'dead') and do somewhat more complex blending

i am kinda concerned i won't be able to use any premade assets for this b/c all of this is, presumably, expecting fairly specific kinds of models. like. if i'm generating leaf color on a spectrum from green to red to brown, i can't just use a model that has a baked-in material texture that's green, b/c then the blending won't work right. i need weird greyscale plant textures or something.

also i could theoretically have different materials/shaders for different parts of a plant (deadwood goes brown -> grey but dead leaves go green -> brown), but that would require the model to have those mats set up on it somehow...? i really don't know how modeling works

anyway all that means it's gonna be cubes for a while yet