What got in since last time:
- game saves! This was a big chunk, and btrees are not fully supported (only the blackboard)
- resource icons & resource widget
- splatmap for dirt, grass, and stone. The splatmap is a way to store the cell type and therefore basic color in the few channels of an image (red channel for grass, green channel for stone, blue for water, etc. base layer is dirt). I wrote a shader to color the ground according to the splatmap, making this base coloring process quite fast.
- multimesh for rocks
- multimesh for trees
- multimesh for grass:
- with a 3d model, didn't look good
- with a 2d sprite, didn't look good either
- with 2 2d sprites at 90 degrees angle from each other on each cell, still didn't look good
- with one random sprite out of small pool of 2 (I'm trying here), so far it's the least terrible, but it's still terrible I'm not happy about it. Here's how it looks:
What I'd like to get to, is a pretty much invisible grass, except when something stands into it, then we see its "depth" as it covers the base of what is in it (eg the feet of a citizen, the base of a crate, etc). I guess I need to spend a little more time digging into the right type of shaders. Also, I'm building a prototype, grass really isn't a priority, so I'll do with solid green tiles for now.
I added support for drawing dirt paths, for citizen to walk faster and basically follow tracks. I want to make them "buildable", so that they necessitate a prefect to clear the grass before the path is created. For that I'll need