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!

Hello everyone!

Today was full of advancements within the engine. In the morning I decided to tackle fall damage, which of course led to some kind of health system. When working on fall damage, I also took it upon myself to improve the player physics, as I was a bit bothered while testing fall damage - I jumped off a tall pole of dirt and fell to the ground with no sort of acceleration. So, I decided to incorporate acceleration and terminal velocity (which is set at about ~70 blocks per second). I then incorporated the improved falling physics into the fall damage system, making it so that velocity affects damage. This makes it possible to add gliders with no damage at all, or dropping a measly two blocks to be instantly killed. (Completely unrelated, but I also added a small tag by the hotbar that shows which item you have selected in the color of its rarity).

However, after testing for a prolonged period of time, I found myself with negative health in many situations, which brought me to create a death screen. The death screen chooses from a number of different messages and displays them. I also created a player state machine so that I can set the player to be in different states - different states execute different scripts. Right now, the only two states are playerDead and playerActive.

Aside from all of that, I also managed to align chunks correctly, regardless of the generation settings. This is a big step for biomes, as it allows me to generate chunks with radically different settings and still have them be in line with each other.

Until next time, folks!