009 - September 30, 2018

Hey!

This past week I was supposed to implement terrain rendering and make more progress on planning out everything that's left to do before the initial release of Akigi.

I was off my routine a bit since I was at my job's team trip for most of the week, but luckily I still managed to make some progress.

We render our terrain using a heightmap and multi-texturing it with a blendmap.

Our terrain is a grid of triangles with the y dimension for each vertex determined by sampling from a height map image.

When we render the terrain we sample from a blend map and use the sampled blend map color to determine the weightings of four different ground textures for that fragment (currently grass, stone, water and dirt but those are placeholders).

When we render entities such as players we ask the Terrain struct for the height at the location of the entity and use that to determine the entity's y coordinate in the world.

This ensures sure that an entity is always rendered just on top of the terrain even though our terrain has varying heights.

I didn't get much planning done during the week due to travels, but I ended up making up for this on Saturday and Sunday. Our release planning is progressing nicely and I have a much clearer sense of the remaining work.

When I'm finished planning a task I give it a pink "Fully Planned" label.

At our current pace I'm expecting to be done planning in mid October and then ready for release around mid December.

Right now these are estimates based on the planning that I've done so far.

When I'm done planning out my release tasks I'll have a much more concrete sense of the exact release date.

On Saturday I took a little time to smooth out some of the deployment process. I now have a script to automatically deploy the game's web client. Needing to manually run commands and drag and drop files into AWS S3 was becoming a bit of a hassle since I deploy once a week right now.

I also purchased a wildcard SSL certificate for *.akigi.com, replacing my old individual certificates.

Next Week

Next week I'll continue planning out the remaining items in my release checklist. It feels like we're roughly 1/3rd of the way through planning out our release tasks so if we can get it to 50% by next week that will be wonderful.

I'll also implement the pieces of the chat system that I want in place for release - namely being able to enter chat text on desktop and have it appear above the players head.

I'm going to hold off on implementing chat on mobile devices and displaying recent messages in a chat box until after release.

See ya next time!

- CFN