Props in this engine are static models, which won’t really move or change during gameplay. This is to make them render efficiently - no worrying about every-frame updates or rotations.
The one exception (for now) is lighting, which will be scriptable to toggle on and off. Animated models will come later!
The house and trees are from a map I made in 2D, about 7 years ago for a different game engine. To see them in 3D, after all this time, was a really proud moment.
Speaking of proud moments...
The props work great on non-square terrain. They follow the navmesh nodes’ orientation. But what about bigger props like the house (you’re probably not asking)? Well, I’ll tell you (since you can’t stop me)
They work fine, but there’s also an option to have them follow the navmesh more closely.
I was mostly thinking of this for round (polar coordinate) terrain, as above - this works pretty well, I think. I was envisioning it for fences, but if you want to arrange houses or trees neatly, this should be fine.
But...
...things can get funky pretty quickly on unusual terrain.
They also go down slopes:
You’d get better results from higher-poly meshes, but I think there’s a certain Psychonauts charm here. Or maybe it’s more Persistence of Segfaults.
Well, I’m having a lot of fun. Stay tuned for some in-game beauty shots, and good luck with whatever projects you’re working on :)
The next step on the road to nowhere is importing Models, so obviously it was time to look at Scripting again!
The model and scripting interfaces will probably be sharing a lot of work (this boring [list-of-things-you-can-use], [list-of-things-on-the-map] stuff) and I kind of rushed through scripting, so I gave it some polish.
When you place a trigger on a node, it makes python scripts happen in game. This might be “play a sound when someone steps on this node”.
Then you can also set variables too, such as “play a sound” > “grass footstep noise”. Things with the same variables get grouped together, so big patches of grass footstep triggers are very efficient.
However, having big old patches of [!] icons in different colours was going to get confusing - especially since all the “play a sound” triggers are the same colour - so it was icons time. And colour coding time, and search filters time, and zoomy camera time...
Got some bugfixes and then, finally, models - and I’ll be back where I was in 2013 when I posted this screenshot.
I’ve made some good progress on the Map Editor, so it was time to try building something big. Welcome to 3dPE Island!
Plenty of bugs fixed as I went along (which is... both good and bad?) but alas the map is running at 40 fps. Optimisation pass next then! I think it’s because of all the sea...
While making this, I spent a few days struggling with how to make skyboxes look round, and made this tool, which does it quite badly.
The closing chapter of my October work was trying to update the camera follow system, to keep it smooth as you move between different types of terrain. Limited success...
