May, 2017

The march to Godot 3.0

L33t-Codez

There has been much reworking of the track laying system. We are moving from splines to use arcs (aka...circles) and lines. This change was needed due to performance of splines. To find the length of a spline for example, one must sub divide the spline into an appropriate resolution set of small lines then compute the length from this. Using arcs and line segments gives an exact distance based on geometry. This also helps those with OCD as it looks very neat. It also helps laying rail over bridges which was previously very fiddly.

Wading through the maths of it all has been rewarding and at the same time, pushing one to insanity....

As part of working on this new track laying system, I have also changed the system to allow the player to be able to build anywhere. Previously the player was required to build a track off some existing track, junction or train station. The new method makes things less clunky and gives the player far more control.

Arty-farty

We have been reworking the resource icons from our very temporary vector style to a cartoony hand drawn style. This style improves visual recognition by removing icons from circles and leaving them to have a definite unique silhouette and adding color to these icons improves readability. The cartoon style makes it a bit easier to get a consistent look to the icons and should easily allow mod makers to add their own. Plus its just far more fun to paint cartoon icons in krita than using inkscape and trying to get things oh so perfect and rigid.

On the interface front, we have also been working on the main interface icons. Through experimentation we found that rendering them out of blender using the actual in-game assets helps the player identify more quickly which icon represent which element, as they now look similar.

And so following with the cat theme this week....