This week I had a number of tasks I wanted to get done, but as usual things go sideways and a few important bugs need to be dealt with.
The game saves were playing up which meant that some game elements were not in the correct places when a game was reloaded. I wasn’t happy with the way I was saving the state of these objects (and others) so I’ve put together a more robust method. I now use a global two dimensional array to store the objects instance id along with their x, y, z and angle, and with doors, their state (open, closed, locked) and the starting angle. This new process took quite a while to put together but it is holding up well. I also set up a parent object that I can attach to any instance in the game so that it is registered to save it’s state which makes things a lot easier.
Once that was done I could focus on the other alterations and improvements I did have planned.
The flashback scenes used a bloom effect to make them feel ethereal and dream like but I wasn’t overly keen on the bleached out colours that it produced. So, I decided that I would remove that and instead use a black and white filter. This will instantly give the player the ‘Oh, this is the past’ feeling.
Also, in the flashback scene there are quite a few NPCs and I wasn’t completely happy with the heads. Now that I’m using Daz3d for character models I thought I’d see what I could do for the top-down characters. The first challenge was getting Daz3d to hide the entire character except for the head – strange there isn’t a simply shift click and hide button. Instead you have to expand the entire skeleton structure and click to hide each element individually. Now that’s done though I have a save file for a male and female head that I can adjust for my needs. The renders from Daz3d are really great and instantly improved my flashback characters. I also made a start on – opps – can’t say anything more here – spoilers 🙂
