Hello and welcome, Invaders!
I give up.
Wait, what?!
No, no, no, not like that! The game is still being developed. I mean I give up on trying to stick to Caturday for these updates. I’m still doing them, but they will either be Caturday or Meownday, because even with calendar reminders I’m still forgetting which day it is (big shout out to time blindness, you're really making things easy ːsteamfacepalmː).
So you'll get updates at some point in the week, but I’m not going to stress about which day it is. There’s plenty of anxiety to be had without that.
Whew! Crisis averted!
In better news, I actually accomplished something this week! I was able to fix the visual bugs with the transitions between biomes so that it no longer looks like leaving a biome is leaving the map. Those perfectly straight lines were making folks nervous.
It might sound weird, but this was actually something I learned about in my college years. In games, straight lines look like areas you're not supposed to be able to access. So I had to fix it.
Biome blending, yay!
First, here’s what it used to look like:
I originally thought this was going to be a simple fix. As it often does, though, the depth of the solution was made apparent by the disastrous (ok, that's hyperbolic) first attempts to address the issue.
At first I thought “Ok, just make some edge tiles and add them to the world chunks”. Simple and straightforward.
Didn't work. Made things worse actually, because all of the edges were visible on all chunks and it looks weird and disjointed.
So I turned to algorithms.
First, I had to tell the world how to know if something needed to have edge tiles. Queue a good 90 minutes of trying to math that out, because my brain isn't the best at mathing and I'm still a little foggy and under the weather from last week. Too bad Blutters wasn’t around to do it for me.
Anyway, got that sorted, which then brought to light an issue with scene tree ordering. Folks, I had to write my own array sorting algorithm! Not a big deal to some, but it was a curtain I hadn't peeked behind before because it seemed scary.
It actually ended up not being too bad because I have access to the internet and someone on the Godot Engine forums had a similar enough issue that I could find code and adapt it. Woohoo! I love it when that happens.
Then I had to write code that would micro-manage the scene tree ordering (and therefore the render order) for every currently loaded world chunk. Again, not too bad because there were only so many ways to approach this that iterating through all of them was only like an hour of time.
Then THAT solution brought to light a problem with the tilesets themselves. That was actually the longest part of the fix because I use 255 piece tile sets to get those nice diagonals, and some of the sets are multiples of 255 tiles because I want the paths to be a little less repetitive.
Next, I updated all the rest of those assets and tested (and tested and tested). And now the biomes blend in a much more pleasing way, so you no longer have to wonder if you're about to crash the game by crossing a perfectly straight line into the unknown.
Basically, this fix was a lot of little things that added up to a lot of my time this week.
Here’s what it looks like now:
Hey, at least that sounds much more productive than last week!
Thanks! It was. I was so relieved to be able to actually focus on this issue for long enough to fix it. I was sort of dreading getting into it, but I'm glad I finally got around to tackling this bug. It was one of those things that doesn't break the game, but is offputting to players, which is arguably just as important. I want you to love this game for its strangeness, not be anxious about traversing the world.
It's a fine line, but I'll walk it just for you.