023 - Jan 20, 2019

Back at it again!

Last week I worked on the equipment system that allows players (and some entities) to wear and hold things such as clothing and weapons.

I got almost all of the backend finished, but there's still work left to be done on the front end.

I also did some work on the assets / graphics side of things.

I made a human rig in Blender and made a basic walk animation. It'll certainly need to get re-done, but it's enough to get an alpha of the game live.

I also made a quick mesh for a human - again just to have something in place for an alpha release - it'll need to get re-done and polished.

After that I spent a little time optimizing my script that exports assets from Photoshop into a texture atlas and from Blender into the binary format that my game uses. I used rayon to parallelize the collapsing and exporting of my PSD layers into PNG files, but the real savings came from running a release build of my asset compiler instead of a debug build. This brought me from 15-20 seconds to a few seconds.

In the future when I revisit these asset compiler optimizations I'll implement caching so that we don't re-process assets that have already changed, but I'm not sure when I'll take a look at that.

Next Week

  • Finish my terraform setup so that my infrastructure is fully in source control

  • Build out the equipment frontend so that players can equip and dequip items.

  • Introducing lighting to improve the look and feel


See ya next time!

- CFN