20062019

Added grass, plus a whole bunch of other changes, most of them insignificant enough to not warrant an attempt at documentation. I’ve been working very inconsistently the past few days and have been overwhelmed by a general sense of free-floating anxiety.

Anyways, the grass is pretty much directly imported from matharoo’s “Depth-Based Grass + Wind” asset, and the only modifications I’ve made deal with formatting and minor changes to variable names. Technically it’s a paid asset so I really shouldn’t commit it, but… I’ll probably end up just removing it in the final build or something and hoping nobody reads the commit history. It uses a vertex buffer to draw all the grass sprites programmatically distributed throughout the room, and then uses a shader to slightly skew the sprites to simulate wind. It’s a pretty straightforward process (although the implementation and execution of it is pretty involved so I won’t go into any further detail about it), but ends up looking really good, with little cost to performance.

I’m thinking about adding a bunch of larger, thicker vegetation – things like long weeds, bushes, rough brush, patches of tall grass and the like – using objects, and adding some player interaction to them. By that, I mean stuff like dynamic movement when the player walks through them, since the grass doesn’t have any effects. For stuff like that I think I’m gonna handplace it.

In general, I’ve been working on systems a whole lot these past two weeks or so, but I think I’m gonna switch over to environmental work for a change (and also because I’m not feeling so good all of a sudden, and don’t really feel mentally equipped to work on systems). By the end of this week I’d like to try to get a decent-looking environment together, with trees and rocks, maybe a structure. Well, we’ll see if it happens.