refined the 3d cursor a bit. pretty happy with it. the thickness will be user adjustable. it also shows through terrain, but slightly dimmer where it's obscured
also showing "mouse pointer mode" where you can mouse over anywhere on screen to interact with blocks, and you mouselook with the right mouse button
thinking of keeping this as a toggleable mouse mode. thoughts?
edit: broke my thread :( previous posts are here https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/115345413827332419
fun fact: in order to draw the cursor as translucent i had to use the stencil buffer, because the boxes that make up the "lines" overlap at the corners, so without the stencil buffer it'd be more opaque at the corners
testing customizable thickness/opacity for the 3d cursor. think being able to set this to whatever you want will be nice for accessibility
oooohhhh what if i made it jiggly??
added an outline to the 3d cursor so it's always visible
i can now overlay a block breaking decal on blocks, and it works on blocks with shell texturing and even nominally on objects like ferns and flowers
i draw the block's faces again using the stencil buffer, then draw the breaking decal with depth read/write off, masking using the stencil buffer
the way it works for ferns/flowers is i just draw all faces of the breaking pattern block, and any pixels outside the object model are masked
major milestone in block game development: the first actual gameplay! you can go around and hold the left mouse button on blocks in order to break em :D
just discovered that the shell textures on leaf blocks do a really cute thing when they surround another block :3
changed the way block breaking work. 3d cursor now changes to encompass the whole block and the breaking decal is shown on all faces
i'll probably change the cursor to full block vs face (or no cursor at all) depending on what your currently held item is later but for now this works
not 100% sure what to do about hidden corners. should they show through other geometry with xray vision or just not be drawn?
time to turn in for the night but i managed to get some item icon rendering going
current status: agonizing about what to do for font rendering. do i wanna do truetype fonts, or use pixel art fonts
does my old truetype font implementation even still work at all?
edit: nope my truetype implementation is gone so if i wanna go with something i already have i guess it's pixel fonts
edit2: ok i can feel the life draining out of me just researching font systems so for now i'll just go with what i have and works: pixel fonts
decided to go with a very 16-bit feeling aesthetic for block game's GUI. took a while to set up the shader for the background color gradient but it's totally worth it with the dither and crunchy pixels. and it can go diagonal, horizontal, or vertical!
oh and yes, you can customize the gradient colors :3
took all dang day but i have my custom font ready now. it's a tweak of the font i made for MidBoss to make it look a bit more like a system font, so i'm calling it sysboss
comes in regular and bold
implemented auto GUI scaling, in a way where i can easily mix low res pixel and high resolution image elements
pictured are 640x360 and 960x540 (resized with nearest neighbor to 1080p in post) as well as 1080p
the GUI will be designed to scale cleanly with crisp pixels into 720/1080p and beyond (4k/8k)
note that the magnification and low resolution makes the linear scaling on the 540 pixel resolution look much worse than it is. for example, here is 1600x900, unscaled, which has linear filtering on the GUI pixels
this GUI scaling is why making the background gradient shader was kinda tricky. the way i render pixel perfect stuff at high scales is to just scale via nearest neighbor
but the gradient is just two colored triangles on the GPU, so there's no texture to scale. instead i had to do the pixelated effect in the fragment shader so i can set a scale and render the menu background at high res but with the expected chunky pixels
created the hotbar today, and block game is really starting to look like a game now!
and best of all, the entire bar is reskinnable by changing the gui.png and gui.json files :3
just gotta put blocks in the hotbar when you break em, and then place them in the world from the hotbar, and add torches somehow and we'll have ourselves a playable prototype
if i can pull that off in the next 10 days i'll have taken block game from nothing to playable in just 2 months. that'd be a nice feather in my cap
it doesn't just look like a game now, it *is* a game! :D
select hotbar slots with scrollwheel or with the keys shown in the upper left of the slot (indicated by background color). press 'R' to ready/sheathe whatever's selected (indicated by the golden cursor). while nothing is readied or the slot is empty left click breaks blocks. if a block is readied left click places that block
@eniko TBH the gameplay as it now stands is how I perceive most crafting-survival games. Only with a lot more padding and annoyance. And maybe some sort of decay mechanism, so just make random blocks disappear once in a while. Yup that pretty much sums it up. Also make sure key materials are only available about 9 hours travel away, and are essential to build anything fun.
Hmm, sounds like I should talk to my therapist about this. :o
@pianosaurus @eniko I mean it's the same flavour as a creeper blowing up your stuff - it certainly adds something, but I don't like it
I'd rather not have to be that careful
@Ronflaix per quad, it just has two color stops, one for one end of the gradient and another for the other end
i actually used 256x256 grayscale textures to get the gradient value at any given position
@eniko Interrobang, my beloved!!
‽⸘
@swetland oh yeah it's supposed to have a 2 pixel gap between characters, not 1 pixel, i forgot
thanks!
@mtthgn I'm using FNA in C#. There's more info on the site https://enikofox.com/blockgame
I wouldn't recommend using FNA for 3D
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