Hello everyone!

Sorry for the extensive break I've had from Crevis. I've several things in the past month and a half, most of which are fairly boring.

I first continued where I left off and implemented the day/night system into the game. It looks great, but I plan to add shaders to the sun to give it an edge of realism.

I spent the rest of the time trying to resolve a particularly annoying lag spike, and I've been pressed with a particularly hard decision. A major lag spike happens when entering a new chunk and lasts for about a fourth of a second. It may not seem very long but it can be very annoying when exploring new terrain. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a way to remove the lag. One way of reducing the overall lag is to rewrite the inventory system, as its pretty inefficient.

My personal knowledge of memory management and arrays have grown greatly over the past year, and the inventory system that I created last March is not as efficient as it can be. I plan to rewrite the inventory system shortly, which should bump the game's frames up by at least fifty.

Now, onto the meat of the post - using color to store multiple values.
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make_color_rgb(r,g,b);

The GameMaker coding language doesn't have very many datatypes. For example, a vector3 ​would have easily allowed us to put three values into a grid cell. Unfortunately we don't have that data type. This presented me with a problem. I needed at least one metadata slot, so I created a separate grid to hold metadata. As time went on the need for metadata kept coming up - durability, random block sprites, enchantments, and so on. These are values that cannot be held by a single slot.

I had to find a way to put multiple values into one grid cell. At first I used ds_lists but they ate up way too much memory. I made a post on the forum and someone mentioned make_color_rgb.

This function allows you to create your own colors by inserting a value for red, green, and blue. The value it produces is a 24 bit number that stores the three values, perfect for what I need. Today and tomorrow I will be re-organizing item property lists and will be implementing a system that can incorporate the function into the game.

Until next time!

Hello everyone! I have completed the day/night system in a test room! It now must be put into the game, but that's as easy as dropping the object in the game room. It needs a bit of tweaking and I'm going to replace the sun and moon with proper sprites eventually. Here's what it looks like.

So, how does it work? There are a ton of different elements in within the day/night system that you probably would not have thought of.

Time
The day/night system correlates with the time. Time is a value between 0-1440. There's one minute to an hour, making each day 24 hours. 1440 is the amount of seconds in a day. I will be referring to the numeric value of time (0-1440) as "raw time."

A proportion calculates the angle of the sun based on the raw time. The sun is then drawn on the ellipse at that angle.

In this example, the proportion calculates that the sun should be at 90 degrees on the ellipse at 12:59 PM (780 raw time). It gets the position of the sun from a series of scripts.

The fading backgrounds was done very simply with a phase system. Phases are certain spans of time with specific backgrounds. There is a phase for every fading animation as well as static backgrounds. To get the fading effect, two images are stacked: the image to fade from and the image to fade to. The image to fade to starts with zero opacity and then increases to maximum opacity as time goes on. This system uses NO alarms and is very dynamic.

Until next time!

Hello everybody!

I'm not really sure what happened last month, but I didn't post anything. Oops! In the beginning of the month I was quite busy with school activities, but I started to pick up development towards the end of the month, forgetting about the blog... sorry about that guys! So... here's everything I've been working on/am still working on!

Buffers
I was experiencing severe lag spikes when going from chunk to chunk. I did a bit of debugging and found that the source of the lag was saving the chunks. To optimize it, I made sure that the chunk had been modified for it to save to assure I'm not just saving the same exact thing.

After receiving help on the GMC, it was deduced that the GameMaker function ds_grid_write was slowing the game down immensely, so I tried using buffers (a faster way of saving/loading in short). It worked perfectly except for the fact that I was getting some weird bugs with it so I switched back. I will probably try to get this working again in the future.

Saving objects within chunks
I have also been working on being able to save objects within chunks. These objects are created when the chunks are initially loaded and then deleted when the chunk is unloaded. I am having trouble deleting them when the chunk is unloading, but I think I can get this working by tomorrow or the next day.

Preloading chunks
As you know, severe lag spikes happen when crossing into other chunks. I optimized it a tad by making it so that chunks had to be different than what's already saved for them to be saved again. By preloading all of the chunks, it eliminates pretty much all the lag, which is awesome.

Cellular automata caves
Today, I completed underground cave generation using cellular automata (4-5 rule)! It needs tweaking, but it's a great start. I'm excited to start adding vines, stalactites and stalagmites, and pockets of ore.

I also did some minor things:

• Lightmaps can be toggled visible
• Spawnpoints are now set
• Ice spawns on the top of water in cold biomes
• Water ceases  to exist in hot biomes
• Settings can be set and saved for easy access
• Chests say their ID when opened
• Metadata can now be transferred to objects created by chunkloaders
• Chunkloaders now only unload/load chunks that are just entering the view and not chunks that are already in the view for efficiency
• Cleaned up the code in many places
• Toggled on old animations

Until next time, folks!

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the lack of posts recently - I've been busy with schoolwork (yes, it's that time already). Today I perfected background blocks and made it so that separate chunks are generated for the biome, creating interesting background terrain. Check it out!

I also created lightmaps - essentially, they're grids that store light data (chunk cells that can either be 0 or 1, depending on whether there's a block there). This allowed me to incorporate background blocks with lighting and it also allowed me to create light blocks - more on this tomorrow. However, with all the new additions, I've noticed a surprising drop in framerate. I plan to fill next month with optimizations (or the remainder of this month).

In the screenshots you can also see that the player rig is in complete disarray... still working on it. After I sort the rig out I'll focus on incorporating light blocks & optimizing the game. I'm also going to be implementing water in the near future.

Until next time!

Hello everyone!

I have spent the last four days organizing data structures a lot of the messy code in the game, making it easier to create new content. I also made an adjustment to chunk saving to allow for more data to be saved - chunks are now saved within ini files. This allows me to save other things like metadata and multiple chunk layers within the same file. Metadata is also something I have really wanted to incorporate with the chunk system, because there are still objects that cannot be saved as tiles - chests, crafting tables, etc.

I made a separate ds_grid for background blocks and also am going to make a separate grid for metadata - not sure if this is the most efficient way of doing this, but I'll try. Here's  a screenshot of the background blocks -

Not the best showcase, but I wanted to have some kind of screenshot for you guys... haven't posted anything interesting for a while.

​Until next time!

Hello everyone!

This isn't going to be a very interesting post, but I spent most of my time today re-organizing various biome attributes. Previously, I had a system that looked like this:

I had a script with a ridiculous number of arguments - and GameMaker has an argument limit... and I don't like limits. I wanted to do more biome improvements (among those improvements biome transitions).

The transitions between biomes aren't particularly smooth. While the biomes are aligned by temperature, there's no smooth transition in blocks between biomes. If a desert is next to a mountain, the sand will instantly change to stone. I wanted to fix that today, but I found that I had reached the argument limit with my chunk generation script! The solution? Enums (enumerators)!

​I set up a huge list of enums for all of the different biomes, and then modified the generation script to only require 3 arguments (allowing me to set an indefinite amount of parameters for biomes without using any more arguments).

Until next time!

Hello everyone!

Today (and yesterday) I've been working on perfecting the system that replaces alarms as well as armor. I'll talk about the alarms first. The system I'm working on consists of a variable called 'step' that increases every tick of the game, working as a timer. I can then use this variable to count when the block breaking animation should advance a frame. There are a few complications with this system that I'm still trying to work out.

Aside from the alarm system, I'm starting work on the revamped Spine model... starting with armor!

This creature here is a 'lizman', one of the races that I'm working on. In this screenshot you can also see how bones are set up. Bones can be moved to manipulate the model.

​Until next time!

Hello everyone!

Today, I tweaked many of the biomes. I made most of their elevations in the world consistent so that biomes like deserts don't tower over mountains. I also made empty oceans to be later filled with water. I also finished the mangrove biome and made a few more items to be accommodated within various biomes (mud, etc.).

I have also been working on moving away from alarms, because there are several limitations. For those of you that don't know what alarms are, alarms are GameMaker's way of timing things. You can initiate an alarm and give it a value, and it will count down from that value in milliseconds and execute a script. In my case, it executes breaking blocks.

Alarms require a minimum of six milliseconds to be initiated, which makes it impossible for me to create pickaxes that break blocks quickly. As a solution, I'm making my own timing system, which consists of a variable that counts down - more on this tomorrow.

Until next time!

Hello everyone!

Today was a fairly productive day. I tackled trees, scriptable items, and a few inventory bugs.

I pretty much did trees the same way as vegetation - create them as tiles and give them special properties to have the player ignore them when checking for collisions.

I also created scriptable items! This means that when consuming an item I can run a script - eating, drinking, potions and various effects are now possible. I created a test item 'Nifedipin' that allows me to noclip in the world. This is pretty useful when taking screenshots and generally flying around. Back on track: I created scriptable item functionality without adding any more variables to the long list of existing variables for the items.

TL;DR - There are a ton of variables in the item array and I decided to reuse them.

Notice the variables block_tile, block_obj, and block_hard. These are all variables that aren't being used because the it's an item that can't be placed. Because they aren't being used, I can use them for the scriptable items.

Block_tile tells the engine that it's a scriptable item, and from that point the game recognizes that there's a script in the block_obj variable and a parameter in the block_hard variable. Then I simply plug these variables into something like this:

Until next time!

Hello everyone!

Today was extremely productive. I created the biome system... and it's much closer to being done than you'd think. When starting the biome system, I wanted them to be chosen based on temperature, so that deserts don't spawn next to tundras. As of right now, there are 19 different biomes, and they are ordered by their temperature.

1. Frozen Ocean
2. Ice Spikes
3. Tundra
4. Tundra Hills
5. Rocky Mountains
6. Ocean
7. Mangrove
8. Rainforest
9. Rainforest Hills
10. Forest Flats
11. Forest Hills
12. Swamp/Bog
13. Steppe Flats
14. Steppe Hills
15. Savanna Flats
16. Shrub Flats
17. Desert Flats
18. Desert Hills
19. Desert Mountains

As I said, these are a few basic biomes and there will be many to come.

You might've also noticed that there's vegetation! There was no system in place to deal with vegetation/decorative tiles, so I added different plants the same way that I added in blocks, and I modified their collisions to act as plants. I also added capability for multiple textures for blocks, but I'm not sure if the method I'm using is very efficient - so we'll just have to see how it works out.

Furthermore, I removed the chunk border lines and made it so that 5 chunks are always loaded around the player to make the experience more seamless. However, this took a huge toll on the fps, dropping it from a consistent 300 fps to 200 fps. I (obviously) still need to work on optimizing the game. Tomorrow, I'm going to work on adding trees and possibly caves.

Until next time!