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Thursday, October 18, 2018

I'm baaack, kinda.

I'm using the Godot engine to create a game titled Adventure's EDGE. Progress is coming along steadily, but I'm running into some problems. The current build (indev 0.04) has a problem with the sky. I'm changing a layer's alpha by turning 0-256 to a hex pair of numbers, but the converter goes outside the string I use to convert the numbers. I just need to subtract one from the number, but I have several other things to do so I'll let the crash slide until I update. The game doesn't have enough content to warrant a fix

Another problem I'm coming across is lag. Having too many physic body nodes, areas, or raycasts tends to lag the game. About 200 or more can be used before the problem gets bad, but they add up fast. Sixteen hosing/shop plot areas with three bodies each, each having 4-10 doors that each have an area and a static body, plus 64 NPCs and 25 lazuna creatures with kinematic bodies tends to add up fast. I have a solution to use far far less bodies for anything static (even item pickups) but it will need a re-work of much of the content. This is not including the trees for the forests, which will need a tiny re-write of the attacks (and the attacks themselves will need to use raycasts). Much work and planning needs to be done, but I'll have another trick for reducing lag (best one yet) along with my animation and rain tricks. Might be a lot of work, but the result will be good (or I'll die of adrenaline sickness).

Adding complex scenes to another scene can lag the editor and crash it. With 16 buildings (or more), that tends to happen often. I'll have to make placeholder scenes and swap them out, then load NPCs, place the player, add lazuna, and start the scene. Might not change scenes, but add/remove sub-scenes to/from a node to speed up loading. This will also allow me to implement a loading animation to fill as the scene loads, so I have that going for me.