Hello and welcome to the 34th CardLife DevBlog,
Lot’s to share with you this week with loads of progress being made on several major features, so let’s get to it:
Ongoing Work: Building
We are nearly finished implementing all of the building naming convention that dictates what pieces can snap together. Once this is done we will have a fully functioning building system which is very exciting. We need to finish a few small tasks to improve the overall feel such as making a piece of card you're holding transparent and adding audio etc, but once we have the core functionality in and working we plan to release it so everyone can have a play. Obviously it will be very rough around the edges at first with bugs and lots of z-fighting but we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible.
Cian has also been loving the building system and has been creating some very interesting bases:
Ongoing Work: Crafting & CTD
We did plan to release a build this week which would have contained the Connect the Dots crafting for tools, but we ran into a nasty bug that was causing it to crash when running the straight skeleton algorithm. So at the moment in the Dev build you can craft your own tools and draw custom shapes but we decided to fix the bugs first before releasing it. We are also planning to do lots of improvements to the CTD crafting once we have the core gameplay loop in the game.
Ongoing Work: Combat & AI
PVP combat has been implemented on the Dev server - so you can now damage and kill other players. This means that you can attack using your hands, tools or weapons and damage other characters. All 1-handed weapons swing at 1 attack per second so when we release the PVP combat patch you will notice that the tools actually use a different animation when attacking as to gathering resources (which are much faster). This is so we can balance all of the weapons/tools together and have the stats be more comparable to each other. While this is functional, Alessio still has to add all of the visual and audio feedback so you can tell that you have actually been hit and/or are successfully hitting someone else, but once this is done PVP will be launched to a server near you (i.e. the one server we have :))
Ongoing Work: Terrain Generation
As I mentioned last week Ed has been working on a loading screen that displays when you get to the edge of a lod 0 cell. This is now working but it’s displaying a bit too frequently on low end PCs, so he has spent a bit of time optimising the ore generation as this was slowing down the overall terrain generation. His next task is to see if we can actually write the world generation to a file. This means instead of generating the data at runtime as you move around the world (which is slow), we are going to read the data from a pre-generated file. This should hopefully speed things up massively with the downside being a much larger installation size due to the pre-generated world file. In the short term we feel this is a good tradeoff until Neil has finished his major rework of the terrain generation.
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Cheers,