Bits and Bobs and Performance

Salutations dear blog reader~
Haku, c'antik (hello friend)

This week was a mostly dedicated to performance tuning, I'm finding when there are large numbers of bullets/explosions on screen there is a noticable performance drop so I am attempting to counter-act this both by reducing the cost of each individual asset as well as tweaking gameplay so that each ship produces more reasonable amounts of bullets. It's still a work in progress but I've been slowly gaining back frames. I've also upped my running to every other day and as of my last run I shaved off just shy of another minute so the time is now at 16m 50s. 🏃🏽

via GIPHY

Above I have visualized how object avoidance has been implemented currently. Ships send out three little feelers which they use to detect objects in their path, in the even that the front is obstructed but one of the others is not they set a waypoint in that direction and follow it until they are no longer obstructed.

via GIPHY

Similar to the 2d version of the game, I have re-implemented the damage that appears on the ship as certain hull health thresholds are met. They always apply a damage decal and sometimes also show a fire particle system. The decals btw are projected textures onto the mesh surface.

Finally, I realized that the game was super confusing for anyone that isn't me as to who is your enemy, your ally, or neutral. So I am now starting on these hud plates that will appear above ships in the scene. They aren't yet implemented but I think this mock-up is about what they'll look like. A name, colored by relation, a health bar colored by relation, and a shield bar (always blue).

That's about it for now, but before I go I wanted to mention a realization I came to recently. I want to always make progress on this game, and I want to get it done sooner than later, but there is no real time frame on this. So I'm going to stop feeling bad every week that I'm not making even MORE progress. I'm working out every other day, it's taking time away from the game, and I'm working on taking care of my home and that's taking time away from the game, but it doesn't matter. The game gets done when it gets done. I'm happy, ka scholit (it's going well for me), and that's enough.
Kiwana'n (goodbye for awhile)