06082020

Been out of power for the past two days because of a hurricane, and have been working primarily off of a rather limited generator and battery power, meaning I’ve only really been able to work three or four hours a day at best. The power company’s predicted that most people on their service will get power back by the 11th – which is next week – so it’ll be like this for a while unfortunately; but I think I’ve started to get used to it by now.

I’ve spent most of my time these past two days finishing up the exterior of the tower, and then cleaning up a bunch of collision and caster implementations, specifically for doors and walls. While the list of things I’ve accomplished since my last attempted post are too numerous, here are the most significant ones: 

+ Created a teleporter object (backend, not in-game) allowing the player to transition between unconventional spawn points and enter into unique world cells (for example, the upper part of the tower). 

+ Added a slight dithering effect to the occlusion effect when Avery passes behind doors; added the same occlusion effect for roofs as well.
+ Added keyboard shortcuts while in the system menu for opening menus (File, Info, Options) moue input. 

+ Fixed reflections on mirror. 

+ Created spatial limiter objects (ROOM_SCALE_W/H) that allow the traversable width and height of rooms to be manually taken into account during transitions, meaning that transitions in narrower spaces are now dependent upon the relative dimensions of the available walkable space rather than the raw dimensions of the entire room (most of which would otherwise be inaccessible, and shouldn’t be taken into account).

EDIT: The power’s now returned, shortly before 2100. Although I’m glad in some sense that I can now return to work, I felt immediately as the lights came on a kind of profound melancholy, like a small vacuum opened up somewhere inside me. The truth is that not only had I started to get used to it – not just the lack of power, but more so, the concomitant slowness and the deliberate sense of contemplation it forced – but I’d actually started to welcome it I think. For the first time in a long time, these past two days felt genuinely empty in a way that I haven’t felt in a very long time: not empty as in the sense of being devoid of meaning, like most days, but empty in the sense of feeling like a kind of receptacle, open to any possibility. The way I felt when I was younger, in high school: that time was wasting but that it was okay.