A bit of a quieter week in terms of the length of the BOTD notes this week. We got a fix and a small new feature done. A few other similar changes are in progress but they didn't get done yet. Of course I've been working on the macroscopic (late multicellular) prototype. Once again I've underestimated the amount of time refactoring takes. The good news is that as there's been plans to make a totally different HUD for the multicellular stage, I won't be refactoring most of it, I just grabbed a few generally useful parts for now to be able to move forward. In terms of visual progress I didn't quite manage what I said would happen this week: showing the editor with white spheres in it. The editor still needs about 50 functions to be actually written (instead of using placeholders with commented out code), and the actual transition from the earlier prototype to it, before I can show it.
Instead I have a few screenshots from a test scene I made. In it I'm testing the metaball rendering. I implemented it using Godot's multimesh feature so that all of the spheres of a single creature can be rendered at once to greatly reduce the CPU load. In the last two screenshots I tested the performance with 40000 spheres, which seems about the limit on my high end computer, which seems pretty much good enough considering if we have creatures made up of a max of couple of hundred metaballs, we can have dozens of them of screen at once.
I've opened a draft PR already for the prototype: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/pull/3377 which nicely shows how much background work is needed before visual stuff start happening, it's currently sitting in at 61 changed files.
Next week I'll continue on the prototype, and I hope I'll get the metaballs showing up in the editor, maybe placing them as well, and then some kind of "environment" where the clump of metaballs can be controlled to float it around.
In this build:
- Fixed toxins not firing in the cell facing direction, instead they
fired in the direction the cell wanted to point at
- Pressing space in the microbe stage now pauses or resumes the game
- Updated translations
- hhyyrylainen