Category: Entries

Spent a good amount of the day working once again with the pond, I barely made any progress and got frustrated so I moved instead to general environmental assets. I got some large plants drawn as well as some bushes, although I think the bushes need to some more work, and specifically need to be made larger. I’ve also adjusted the player movement speed a bit and fixed the hand torch’s angle accordingly (it now uses the proper trigonometric formula), and re-enabled the ambient light around the player. It was not a remarkably progress-heavy day but at least I got some minor stuff done.

Spent most of the morning trying to get the water reflection shader working in the context of a pond… it was stupidly frustrated and in the end I didn’t even manage to get it working even remotely properly. I’m honestly thinking about just dropping the system altogether at this point in favour of a slightly less impressive, but far more straightforward solution that I’ll actually be able to understand. Of course, that being said, I still have yet to make said solution, and I’ve yet to find another option that’s free and accepts open-source, so…

I spent the afternoon with Aurora. We went to the diner and then sat by the lake for several hours. It was pretty nice. The sky today was bleak and I felt a pervasive sense of melancholy, although not particularly negative. When I returned home I found it rather difficult to concentrate although I gave the pond a few more attempts before giving up completely. Maybe I should give it a bit more time tomorrow… although I really do feel like I have to move on at this point. 

Started working on an effect for potable, lightly-moving water sources such as ponds and lakes. I was able to adapt a shader effect by GamingReverends to accommodate my needs perfectly; I still have to figure out some of the intricacies of it such as how to properly animate things such as ripples within it and how I’m gonna handle blending the water into the adjacent ground near the shores but otherwise it looks about as good as I can hope for.

I also implemented a culling system for optimising instances (and particularly grass and trees) via two scripts from lazyeye. They work by deactivating and reactivating some of the more taxing instances to reduce the instance load of things like collisions. It seems to work pretty well since the framerate has improved considerably but I’ll have to keep an eye out on it moving forward…

I kinda felt like shit today and kept on getting distracted for unclear reasons. At some point this afternoon I somehow fell into a deep sleep in which I experienced a very strange and alarmingly vivid dream in which I descended into an amorphous and constantly-shifting version of my high school filled with my old friends. None of them seemed to recognise me and we were all lost without any idea how we got there or what we were doing there. The rooms were simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic and while I initially could recognise each individual room for what it was – a certain classroom, the backrooms of the auditorium, a stairwell we used to hang out in, the gymnasium – when I examined them closer or tried to make sense of where I was all of a sudden the rooms seemed impossibly foreign and even ancient, every dimension and corner evading not only description but observation itself. I don’t know how else to describe it. It felt like we’d been wandering for centuries. 

I don’t how I got out; but it was as equally abrupt and inexplicable as the rest of what happened. For nearly an hour after waking I felt discombobulated and completely disoriented, not exactly sure if I was really awake or if I’d just ascended (descended?) to another depth of the dream. I was only asleep for an hour but it felt like far, far longer.

I recorded all of this down immediately upon waking but every time I tried to recall some specific detail I could feel the presence of this… it felt like there was something burned into the inside of my skull, that I would be able to see if only I could somehow look behind my eyes. I’m not really sure how else to describe it. Thankfully the feelings have by and large subsided, and only a trace of an unpleasant memory remains…

Didn’t accomplish much of anything today in terms of work; I sat waiting for the mailman to arrive with the new hard drive, which I’ve now installed (and works perfectly). I couldn’t work for most of the morning anyways because Windows was updating, which took far longer than it has any real right to take. Consequently my sense of routine was disrupted and I spent most of the day feeling rather restless, simultaneously wanting to work on something yet too distracted to be able to even identify something to work on, let alone concentrate on it.

This evening for some reason I was suddenly seized with an urge to write something again and in a paroxysm of compulsion I started writing the next chapter to I. Doing so has left me feeling rather drained however (which is how writing has made me feel for years now, to be honest) but it’s revived within me a curiosity that I haven’t felt in a few months – and with that, the inevitable and concomitant frustration of feeling such a strong desire to say something while feeling completely impotent in my ability to actually say it. I guess that’s just how it’s always been though. Maybe some day it’ll change. But probably not.

Implemented waves that don’t really work exactly as they should for some reason. I originally designed the system in GMS1.4 (slightly faster workflow for smaller projects, better sprite editor, you know how it is) and it works perfectly fine there, with the waves rolling in and then gradually receding upon the shore as intended. However, when I port it over to GMS2 – with the exact same code down to the spacing – it fucks up and doesn’t draw the rollback. Something’s up with the way the surface is drawn, I know that much; unfortunately I can’t figure it out beyond that. Well, in any case, it doesn’t look bad as is (although it certainly doesn’t look too great either). I might honestly just completely revamp it anyways down the line; we’ll see.

Also added footprints. Right now they’re applied in every room for testing but eventually I’ll just remove them and have them appear only when it’s either muddy after raining, or the player is walking on some unstable surface (like sand, by the water). I spent an unnecessarily long time messing around with the code for them, and I’ve realised now that not only is the timing of the footsteps off, but the speed at which the animation plays and the character walks is completely off as well, as well as the timing of the footfall audio… basically everything about the player movement is just very slightly (or maybe a bit more depending on how you look at it) fucked up but I’ve already spent way too long today messing around with it to very little avail so I’ll worry about it some other day, if at all. Well, at least the footprints fade pretty well.

+ Implemented footprints with fading steps and duration
+ New audio for footsteps on sand, and in shallow water
+ Created room (rmShore) with new wave effects
? The tree occlusion now works exactly as intended – no more clipped masks!
? The game now runs at full-screen instead of windowed
? The game can be exited by pressing ESC

Spent a few hours trying to figure out why the rain audio wasn’t fading properly only to stumble across the rather obscure realisation that asset_get_index does not in fact take string() when working with sound ids, and instead you have to use audio_get_name() instead. That alone took me far more time than I’d care to admit; then I had to deal with audio_sound_gain not working in an intuitive manner(turns out you have to first play the sound via an id of its and THEN feed the id as the index, instead of just being able to plug in the sound directly)… it was all rather frustrating and tiring process but I guess that’s just how it is.

I also implemented a new rain system which uses particles instead of individual rain drop objects. It looks and works a lot better and the overall performance has predictably improved; there are still some minor issues – for example, the rain falls beneath the roof for some as of yet inexplicable reason, and I haven’t implemented rain splashes yet – but otherwise it’s a good start in a good direction.

+ New particle-based rain system
+ New audio for all rain sounds, wind audio in rmGorge
+ Implemented basic 8-directional hand torch, along with toggle in menu
? Trees no longer are drawn twice and now look much better when moving in the wind
? Wind is much more frequent
? Lightning effect has been improved and now illuminates the entire area briefly

Sawyer came over, we went to a diner as usual and then viewed a thoroughly unpleasant and disturbing film. We then discussed the details of how I envisioned the trailer, as well as my projected timeline for work goalposts and target releases, which goes something as follows:

Next week, I’m going to start shifting focus over to implementing environmental stuff which means new rooms / world cells, as well as all the associated spritework. My goal is to have by the beginning of October enough visually diverse and interesting content to be able to begin production on the trailer. Although I don’t imagine it’ll take too long at all, since I’m targeting a winter release date for the first public trailer, I’ll be working these last two quarters at an accelerated rate with the intent of solidifying the foundational mechanical frameworks while simultaneously developing a wide variety of content for the trailer. 

Four months should be more than enough, although I have to be careful given the way I work not to burn myself out or even let that become a remote risk. So long as I maintain my current pace and expectations however I believe I’ve achieved a stable momentum that’s highly productive without becoming conducive to unnecessary stress.

We also discussed a bit about my commercial projections and hopes for this title. I’m not gonna discuss them here because I think those are the kinds of things that – at least during the process of development – are best left private but I will say for certain that I’m broadly optimistic for a number of reasons which I feel are well-substantiated in reality. Here’s hoping my optimism pays off… although first, of course, I have to actually finish the work before all else.

Spent some time this morning sitting outside recording… urination sounds. It’s been unusually cold lately – I suspect it’s the hurricane – but I got the sounds I needed and they work well. I spent most of the day revamping the audio and specifically adding different varieties of footsteps based on the terrain and wetness (which is another mechanic I’ve implemented, or at least begun to implement). 

For some reason I still have yet to commit, let alone push a single changelog these past few days: I don’t know why, I have more than enough changes by now to warrant it. I should push my progress now that I’m thinking about it…

+ Implemented biomechanics for urination, including bladder, stomach and colon volumes
+ New audio for urination
+ New footstep audio based on weight, terrain and environmental wetness
+ Added player status UI
? New audio for picking up / dropping the bag

It’s been pretty difficult keeping up to date with posts. Any time I sit down to write I just feel suddenly overcome by immense exhaustion. Even now I just feel totally wiped and it’s difficult for me to formulate complete thoughts. In any case…

Haolun visited last night and we talked as usual. It was nice seeing him, helped me reground myself. I woke early this morning and spent the morning playing through the Breakpoint beta. It’s seen marginal, although significant improvements from the OTT and I’m looking forward to the full thing next month. I’m running out of money though pretty quickly, and I’ve lost all sources of income… I haven’t really had any significant expenses in a few months but even still, my overall worth is so low that the few things I do spend money on somewhat regularly still manage to feel significant. Well, I can’t think too much about it now. I’ve gotta focus on work.

Speaking of which, I’ve finally managed to implement the backbone for the urination biomechanics, as well as the necessary spritework. The system itself works well and is very flexible; it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the exact values. Honestly the most difficult part wasn’t even implementing the system but figuring out how to design it in the first place; it turns out processes like urination and water intake/output and defecation are much more complicated than I imagined them to be and are contingent upon a whole host of factors that make things like universal predictions and averages very difficult to arrive at. Consequently a lot of might just be completely inconsistent with reality – I have no idea how many mL of water are filtered into urine from the colon per minute, for example – but at this point, so long as it feels real, the technicalities can be damned for all I care. I spent a few more hours than I’d care to admit this afternoon watching my character piss and tracking the change in volume of water within her bladder over a day in a spreadsheet… I think I’m past the point of caring.

Finally back home today. After an eight-hour flight… well, I felt way too drained to work on anything. I’ve been feeling some rather complex, overwhelmingly negative emotions as of late that I feel are impending my ability to work. I hope that returning home will be able to alleviate these feelings in due time – hopefully sooner rather than later. I would like to return to a normal, stable routine of living as soon as possible. 

In Geneva. Stayed in the room once again the entire day. This room felt nicer than the other ones and the scenery seemed nicer than all the rest – but maybe my perception of it has just been skewed by the fact that it’s the last day of the trip. Hopefully by around noon or so tomorrow I’ll be back home. 

I haven’t worked on anything too substantial the past several days, since yesterday was spent commuting and today I was too tired to really do anything. I’ve been having some trouble designing the biomechanics for urination – mostly regarding volume and rate of filtration between drinking and, well, the act of urinating, the entire process of which I’ve discovered is far more unpredictable than I’d initially imagined – and consequently I spent the entire morning reading (or attempting to read, anyways) medical papers of varying degrees of technical obscurity. I spent the rest of the day lying in bed or looking out the window. 

I feel completely drained by this trip, and I’m still not entirely sure what the net effect of it has been. It’s definitely taken a toll on me in more ways than one and while I don’t necessarily regret having seen all of these places (well, nominally, anyways…) I recognise now with absolute certainty that recreational travel is not for me and that cities in particular tend to exact a devastating toll on my general state. I’ll be returning home in a more psychically precarious and fragile state than when I left, with a far greater appreciation for my isolation. 

And yet, with all that being said… for some reason I still feel a little bit wistful. It feels like the time has passed too quickly, that the trip was far shorter than it actually was (even if the moment to moment waiting seemed interminable at the time). Summer is already over; even two weeks ago seems not so long ago yet it feels so much longer ago than it has any right to seem. I have a feeling though that these things have less to do with the actual trip itself and much more with my general sentimentality these days. I’m not sure though, and that too fills me with a muted sense of… something. In any case, whatever it is, there’s this real empty, almost sad kinda feeling beneath it all that I can’t seem to shake. I just hope it doesn’t persist too long.

Sitting on the floor of a hotel room in Paris drinking a Heineken and eating canned ham out of the tin. Haven’t made any updates in the last couple of days, not even out of inconvenience but mostly just because I’ve been too tired to write anything. The most significant things I’ve accomplished in the past several days were writing a proper README for the repository (which in reality was just a direct translation of the press kit DOCX), and drawing the cover image. The latter in particular I think turned out pretty well: it exceeded my expectations in terms of how I imagined it would look (although to be honest, I actually went in with no idea how it would look) and it does a decent job of effectively capturing most of the major iconography and moods of the game.

Fleshed out the canteen UI a bit, it now displays next to the character menu, and animates properly with respect to drinking. I think it’s a bit too big but scaling it is gonna be a pain in the ass. I also think that the character menu itself is a bit off in a way that I can’t really articulate.

+ Better(?) UI for the canteen, see above for details.
? Remapped controls for interact and character menu to accommodate a greater variety of common bindings.
? Character menu can now be closed with the same key used to open it (instead of just ESC).

Cleaned up UI for character menu, added a white background + black text when highlighting items in the character menu, also changed up the options a bit to reflect streamlining of gameplay. Also implemented canteen mechanics: the player can now drink from the canteen, with responsive water capacity (mL). I’m thinking about adding an animation for when the canteen is empty.

Changing the process of accessing the pack a bit: created a new animation for opening it, and changed the access behaviour so that when Avery’s standing in front of the bag, she picks it up, and when she’s standing behind it, she opens it. The animation itself could use some work and is a bit off in terms of the alignment, but that’s something I can work on later down the line. I’m also testing a dynamic zoom function for certain actions, starting with the pack; hopefully I can get the zoom actually working properly and not looking like shit…

I’m also thinking about moving the game to revolve around a single action button instead of having multiple. What this looks like in practice is having WASD (and maybe the arrow keys, although probably not) to move, and then a single key – for now, F, but I’ll probably add more / change it later on – is used for virtually all player interactions within the environment. What that means is that actions will either be analogue (via the interaction key) or through a menu, which uses the movement (WASD) keys + the interaction key. I probably articulated all of this in a very unnecessarily complicated and drawn-out manner but it makes a lot more sense in execution. We’ll see.

+ New animation for opening pack
? Pack access behaviour changed relative to player’s position
? Added sound effects for picking up and dropping the pack
? Removed all button prompts (ie, “[F]”) in interaction text for cleaner experience
? Removed B as pack key, switched picking up / dropping the pack to the character menu instead

Sitting in a hotel room in Rome. In the past several days I’ve traveled through four countries and yet I feel nothing but profound exasperation and an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. All of the progress I felt I was making in the weeks prior to this trip is being rapidly undone the longer I stay out here – and I still have another ten days left. Well, at least the next few days will see slower movement. Hopefully I’ll have time to work more.

Lacking a proper connection as well as a consistent power source, it’s been a total pain in the ass working on anything these past few days especially. I decided to get started on the press kit, which turned out alright. No images or videos so far, obviously, but it’s a good enough foundation to build off in the future. Gotta keep busy somehow.

Onboard a train en route to Stansted. It’s been rather difficult to maintain a stable signal the past several days, let alone one that’s consistent enough to attend to all of my work: I’ve spent the past several days in a state of continuous disorientation due to all the transit and I haven’t really found the time to get work done, although I think for what little time I’ve had so far I’ve made decent progress.

I’m not sure how I’m gonna handle entries for the duration of this trip – whether I’ll update them as the opportunity arises – but for now I think what I’ll do is log per diem and then once I return home I’ll do a more comprehensive cumulative write-up in a single dedicated entry, focusing on points of note. 

Anyways…

The door now has a proper caster, as well as a dedicated animation (for both the player and the door itself) for opening and closing it. There are also sound effects as well, although at this stage they’re more just for prototyping than anything else.

+ Implemented proper shadow caster for door

+ New animation for door (door and player)

+ New sounds for opening and closing doors, and attempting to open locked doors (not used so far)

+ New sounds for footsteps on grassy, hard and muddy surfaces

+ Created new script “sound_play_pitch” for repeating sounds with on-the-fly pitch changes (ie, footsteps)

+ Created new script “sound_lowpass” to shift between regular and low-pass audio.

? Renamed “sound_play” to “sound_play_3d” for more precise description

? Stones, sticks and tall grass are now automatically deleted if in contact with interiors to prevent clipping

? Changed the shadow mask on the cabin to more accurately reflect visibility via a window in the front

? Being in an interior now also displays a cutout of the front wall, specifically highlighting the location of doors and windows

Gonna be spending the bulk of tomorrow in transit to London, which means I had to pack up all my stuff. I worked almost entirely on audio today and specifically on implementing a low-pass filter on rain when the player is indoors. I set up a pretty flexible crossfade system that works very effectively and I’ve also begun using it for the overall forest soundscape as well, moving between day/night ambience. Speaking of, I changed those sound effects to quieter, less wind-heavy tracks, and converted all the ambient audio files over to OGG to further reduce size on disk and memory footprint. I’m feeling pretty good about the audio right now; when I return (on 3 September…) I’ll have to make sure to get new recordings for moving through brush and maybe even footprints, although that might require better equipment to which I don’t currently have access anymore. Well, I’ll figure it out then.

Staoue came over today and we spent some time by the lake and then we went to the high school, where we passed the time lying down and watching the sky as the storm moved in. It looked like a massive, dark wave surging towards us and it made me feel uncomfortable but having a friend by me made it a worthwhile experience. We talked about high school – it seems like that’s all I ever talk about these days when I meet my friends, but we do talk about other stuff – and girls. I’ve been feeling real nostalgic lately. It’s not that I want to be back in high school: things were just much more straightforward back then. Everyone was just put there all together, and you never had to really reach out and find people: they were just there and all you had to do was find some common ground and all of a sudden you were great friends and you felt something in common with them. There was a clear and palpable understanding of the future and even if it looked totally empty, the sense of a schedule gave the days a kind of structure and intertia towards which we constantly stumbled and occasionally hurtled. 

It’s much harder now though. 

Everybody’s either gone away or they’ve all got their own goals now and I can’t relate to so many of them. Going out to see them or to meet new people costs money that I don’t have and can’t make. Even if I were able to meet them, I don’t know if we’d have much to talk about anymore: in the lack of common interests, there are no more shitty assignments to bemoan, no more teachers to mess around with, no more rumours to piss away the time. All that’s left to us to share is this creeping sense of uncertainty about ourselves, our futures, where we’re headed as individuals and as a nation and as a species. I know that sounds really dramatic, but really, it’s actually quite banal. And that’s the saddest part. We think we’re becoming mature, you know, we’re becoming adults or whatever and learning how to deal with “the real world” – but actually, we’re just growing more cynical, more indifferent towards and even accepting of the casual cruelty of the world. That makes me really sad. I don’t want to get used to being swept away. I don’t want to see my friends get used to being swept away either. But I’m afraid we already have.

Didn’t do any work today but I met up with an old friend from high school and we got some ice cream and sat in the park and then we went back to her place where we (mostly I) drank so much that I threw up in her basement bathroom twice and then we talked for a long time about those bygone years. It was nice seeing her again after all this time. I missed her more than I realised.

Finally got around to implementing the grouped prefabs I mentioned in yesterday’s post for the grass. It works very well and although the dispersion pattern could be significantly improved and the wind pattern tweaked a bit the tall grass now works as intended. Other than the aforementioned tweaks, the only things I can really think to add are mild particle effects for various leaves and such blowing off when the player passes through into the wind. I think tomorrow I’ll work on that as well as particle effects in general. 

+ Tall grass, with randomised dispersion and player/wind-based motion.

+ Added ambient soundscapes for the forest during both night and day.

? Slightly sped up the speed at which rain accumulates during transitions. 

? Significantly increased (5s to 20s) the time it takes for ambient soundscapes to fade in during transitions.

? Doors now have proper shadowcasters blocking and opening FOV when respectively closed and open. They also have slightly more legible sprites.

Hung out with Sawyer today and watched both Blair Witch films (that is to say, the original and the 2016 remake). They were both much better than I remembered, and I had pretty good memories of both of them. Watching them definitely helped me get a much better idea of how to handle certain elements of My Work Is Not Yet Done.

Speaking of which, I finally managed to implement the rest of the door, however half-assedly, which still needs a proper shadowcaster and animation (maybe a good sound effect would suffice in place of the animation) but is otherwise working as intended; and I started work on denser grasses featuring wind animation which proved to a much bigger pain in the ass than I expected. 

That being said though I think I’ve finally solved the main issue – smaller grasses were animating way too fast – although tomorrow I think I’m gonna try a new solution where I’ll separate each individual blade of grass into an object, create a bunch of what are essentially prefabs of grass clumps with those blades clustred together in various configurations, and then spawn the prefab objects rather than the sprites themselves. It’ll be pretty annoying to set up at the start but I think it’ll have a very positive impact on the appearance of the grasses overall. Hopefully though it won’t dig in to the performance too much, which is something that I’m already beginning to worry about: I noticed today that in some areas the framerate dips down to around 16 or so, which is completely unacceptable for a game that already runs at 24fps to begin with. I’ll definitely have to take a deeper look into optimisation. Maybe I’ll work on that next week on the plane…

I didn’t do much today either but at least I got the door done. It’s real primitive right now – interacting with it basically just toggles the visibility of it at the moment – but hopefully I can improve it in the coming days. The ideal goal is to be able to gradually open it on the hinge so that the player can peek out of the door slightly if necessary; however, I’m not sure if the lighting solution I’m using currently supports casting at an angle (or any kind of dynamic caster manipulation, at that) but if it doesn’t, I suppose this will have to do… it’s not all that bad to be honest, just lacking compared to what I originally envisioned it could be. But then again, if we were to start judging things by what they could be…

I woke up thinking I was gonna get stuff done today but in fact I just sat at my computer and did nothing. I don’t even know if I had any plan for today – I probably didn’t – but tomorrow, I’m gonna work on the door + shadow masking for it, and maybe start on some furniture. 

Nic’s article about Midnight Animal came out today, you can read it here. I still have yet to read it – an odd mixture of feelings – but from what I’ve heard he did a very good job with it and the overall reception has been overwhelmingly positive, so I’m glad that it turned out well for both of us. I’ll probably read it at some point tonight…

Spent all day messing around with various lighting systems across all different kinds of implementations – shaders, surfaces, straight-up line traces – before finally arriving at a solution I’d already been using for over a month now (albeit for different purposes). I’m using a slightly modified version of this lighting system now to simulate FoV in interiors, and it works really well for my purposes because it’s pretty lightweight and slots in really effortlessly without too many changes to any other things.

The one thing I did have to change though was the grass, which I was planning on changing eventually anyways because before I was using a paid extension off of the GM Marketplace. Since both the lighting and the grass rely on vertex buffers, which I know literally nothing about, they broke one another’s functionality so I decided to remove the less critical one. I’m now generating all of the grass as objects, with a single draw pass in the master draw event. It looks basically identical to before although I’ve lost the slight animation for the wind effect; I’ll mess around with some shaders or even hand-animated sprites maybe at some point, I’m not too worried about it. 

I haven’t noticed any major performance dips which is what I was originally concerned about, but also, I have noticed pretty significant dips (down from the fixed 24 to around 18 or so) although I haven’t been able to identify the exact cause. I was also recording footage though when I noticed the dips and I think the game’s been running on the integrated chip this whole time, so if that turns out to be the issue, it’s not too much of a concern. I’ll still take a look at optimising everything later on down the line, but as they said, never pre-emptively optimise if you can help it…

Spent the entire day (up until now, which is 0330, actually) working on implementing a prototype interior space – a cabin, yes, my imagination runs short – and for all intents and purposes, it basically works right now. Basically, all interior spaces can now be rendered in the world space rather than in their own simulated internal cells. What this means in practicality is that I can now have full real-time events happen seamlessly in the world without loading in between different rooms (ie, entering / exiting interiors); the player will also be able to see through windows and doors into the actual external environment, which vastly opens up my opportunities.

There are still some minor collision overlaps that I have to fix and there’s as of yet no furniture (I’m sure that’ll be a separate issue all on its own, which I’m not at all looking forward to dealing with tomorrow), but in terms of all the basic functionality it works as intended, however annoying it was to assemble and subsequently disassemble everything onto different layers and depths. Honestly, if I had known from the start just how much of a pain in the ass all of this actually would take to implement, I probably would’ve never even considered it to begin with. Now that I’m here though, there’s really no turning back…

+ Created modular layers for building (cabin)

+ Created new room (rmCabin) for testing modular interior

+ Added four additional parent classes specific to buildings: BUILDING, FURNITURE, ROOF, INTERIOR

? Created parent object for items named ITEM, containing the children STICK and STONE (no actual event behaviour, just a holder object)

? Created script draw_self_visible as a replacement for draw_self; because pretty much everything is being drawn in DEPTH_SORTER’s master draw event, the “visible” property is ignored; draw_self_visible is basically just a draw_self that takes “visible” into account

Here are some things I still need to add, as well as things I’d like to implement:

– Functional door

– Interactive furniture

– Dynamic field of vision to black out the exterior space and make windows and doors functional (ie, the player can see outside of doors and windows but not walls)

– Global shadow mask for entire house 

– Hide rain overlay in interiors

Started working on animations for firestarting this morning but then for whatever reason I felt that I no longer wanted to do that today so instead I just started worked on implementing interiors. I mostly just worked on visuals today – nothing to push to the server – because I’m still undecided as to whether I want each interior to be contained within the world space in a continuous manner, or to exist as its own discrete room separate from the world within its own space. 

The latter definitely presents me with a lot more flexibility when it comes to certain things – namely, I wouldn’t have to use a surface to occlude the exterior when the player is in the interior space – but it also means that I would have to move the player to an entirely new room while saving the exact state of the previous one, which is kinda annoying since I haven’t built a save system yet to save and track the state of each room (something else I have to do…), so I’d have to do the latter before the former. 

I think I’ll start tomorrow by trying out the former option – continuous interior spaces – with layered floor, furniture and ceiling indices that are de/activated upon contact with the player. Hopefully it goes smoothly and without any major difficulties; but you know how it is with these things…

Didn’t work on anything today; but to be honest, I didn’t even really try. I hung out with Haolun last night until 0400 or so and then I fell asleep, woke up for a few hours and hung out on Jacob’s stream, then I fell back asleep again and experienced a really strange and disturbing dream until I woke up once again at 1600. After that I realised that I’d basically get no work done even if I tried so instead I spent some time reviewing the week’s activities and figuring out what to do next week. Basically, I need to finalise my decisions on how the firestarting minigames will work, and then I need to actually build them (or at least merge them into the main build). 

Once I finish that, I should work on redesigning the backpack and inventory UI; I’m not that satisfied with the ALICE diagram anymore and I’m thinking about moving towards something like an SSO/SPOSN Attack 2 or even a Veshmeshok instead. I like the look and idea of the external frame and all the pouches but… something about it just doesn’t feel quite right at the moment. I’d also like to add a diegetic animation for opening and closing the bag.

Spent the day sitting outside recording audio of wind and leaves. It was a very nice day outside today and although I think it’s gonna rain very soon I’ve gotten a wide range of audio samples that should cover most of my ambient environmental needs. I’m gonna spend some time mixing them a bit more tomorrow but I was able to build in the backend for the audio system today. It works exactly as intended and was pretty straightforward to set up.

+ Added audio files for heavy rain, light rain and the fire.
+ Implemented flexible backend for positional 3D audio, as well as seamless blending for sounds.
? Fixed an issue with the light rain state where no rain was actually falling during the entire state.

Today was pretty productive, despite having finally gotten out of bed at 1600(!) following a long and vaguely uneasy rest. I was able to add both the sticks and the stones as I planned (well, two days ago…) via a pretty flexible and efficient spawner, and all the code for interacting with them and picking them up is modular enough to be easily adapted to any other object down the line. The firestarting is almost done – the last of the work is UI stuff, which is admittedly pretty involved but I’ll cross that bridge once I get there (which I guess is now) – so hopefully I’ll be able to have some new stuff to share come Saturday.

+ Added sticks and stones as interactive objects in the environment
+ Modular spawner (spawn_item) that spawns a certain number of an object without overlap in a room
? Implemented shorthand version of player_pack_add script that takes only the object name as a string for the argument
– Removed fire hole (a bit redundant, and the sprite looked like shit anyways)

Just since starting this project alone, I feel like I’ve become a much more competent programmer these past few months. In fact, I would even admit that I developed more as a programmer in the last four months than I have in the last four years: although of course, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and learning tends to function on a curve, so maybe I’m just going too hard on myself (the circumstances were much different back then as well).

In other news, I came across this thread on Twitter which perfectly encapsulates the exact kind of mentality I wish I could embody. I think sometimes I’m genuinely able to feel this to some degree, like I’m right on the cusp of realisation; but always, something or someone comes up that causes me to slip. I suppose that’s the entire point: that a person must never lose sight of the good in both others and himself, especially when under pressure. Anyone can feel good when the times are good, after all. But these are especially testing times. For all my platitudes and supposed convictions, I don’t think I have the strength to be a better person, let alone a good one. But I have to try. That’s the least I can do for both others and myself.

Sawyer and I went to see Hobbs & Shaw today and I think it was exactly what I needed in my life right now: a fun, hopelessly positive and feel-good film about the value of friendship and forgiveness and family. Afterwards we got some ice cream and sat at the station and it was a remarkably pleasant evening, and looking up at the clouds I felt an immeasurable sense of optimism and good faith swelling within me, and it made me feel deeply at peace for some time. That all probably sounds horribly cliched and I’ll straight-up admit that it definitely is; but it doesn’t matter, because it felt profound in the moment and besides, nothing’s a cliche when it’s happening to you.

I didn’t get much work done today, and I don’t know if I necessarily feel more motivated, but that’s okay. I feel much better equipped to handle my work tomorrow.