Wednesday Waypoint Zones

Another Bottle Please

Yes indeed, thanks to your combined eyeballs we pushed past 1500 daily views and got to 1599!  My thanks for your interest and all them double visits ;)  My goal was to hit this number, but I did not realize I would get there so soon, so I am setting a truly high goal now of 2000 daily views.  It's a fun little game!

The Progress

Today was trigger zones, but not just any old boxes this time.  As the terrain and entity placement presented a whole bunch of new challenges, we had to make sure the trigger zones could cope with the new non-grid world.

As you can see, the new trigger zones (also called waypoint zones) can be contoured to any shape to allow any kind of perimeter to be defined for your game.  We removed the hurt and heal zones which we felt where a little silly, leaving Win Zone, Trigger Zone, Story Zone and Sound Zone.  Even though a single zone could handle all functionality through scripting, color coding general concepts will help when your levels get larger.

The white circle in the middle of the zone is a handle you can use to drag the whole region around, and right clicking will enter a properties menu where you can specify the particulars of what that zone will do.  The little yellow stars, which might be under the graphical axe, allows you to move the edge of the contour, add more control nodes and delete nodes.

Next Things

Now I can create, delete, save and load these new trigger zones, and the whole markers menu has been cleaned up, Thursday will be about making these zones functional within the engine itself.  The biggest of them of course will be triggering an AI character to respond to your entry into the zone. I think I will have some fun with that!

I also did some other things like change all the assets in the markers folder so new graphics and geometry are used to give it a Reloaded feel.  You don't really want to see any throwbacks from the classic version hanging around.

Signing Off

It's just gone midnight now, and right on cue my eye efficiency has dropped. Before I clock off though, I want to quickly try a few night mode lighting changes. I think the dynamic lights will really pop if the day night cycle really brought in the darkness.  It won't be anything new or magic, just some changes to things like ambient color, fog distance, sky details, and anything else hanging out the edges of the current shader.  With some luck it should look pretty good as the night comes in and gradually changes the whole scene. I like to think you could get two different looking games from the same set of assets, simply by adding night elements.  Shots on this to follow soon.