Little less than a month a way from our demo we've turned out attentions to the story and events that happen within the single player narrative. Shown above the system to have timed and triggered events is now ready for use. We use a timer to keep the pace of the various script elements which should give a smooth read on any device. Now its up to @bflanagin to create a compelling set of activities for the players and we'll be in the final stretch to the demo release.
Lights, Camera, Approximation!
In computer graphics, and in particular non ray-traced game engines (almost all of them) the engine gives up realism for speed. This is a common practice and most of the time isn't a big deal as lighting is used more to set the scene than anything else. In some parts of Allonian Seed light is extremely important to the game play mechanics we are trying to achieve. Because of that we were miffed by the strange errors shown below.
As you can clearly see light is escaping around the walls and ceiling. The models have been triple checked and even thickened to try to convince the game engine that they are indeed solid and light shouldn't pass through or around them. This issue was exacerbated by the fact that the issue only appeared when in game, and didn't appear to be happening within the editor.
After much gnashing of teeth and the discovery that the light bleed only happens if you are using a viewport to present the 3D world on top of a 2D object we were able to achieve darkness. If you have been following our posts, the reason we were trying to use a viewport was to get around the washed out look of our UI. Humorously, the fix came when we parented the UI elements to our player model forgetting to do all the steps to merge 2D with 3D. So somewhere in the game-engine's code the feature exists to overlay UI elements. Regardless, problem solved and now its on to the next big push.
If you want to find out more about Allonian Seed there are some links below, and as always follow @bflanagin and @v-entertainment to keep up with all the in and outs of my projects.
About
Allonian Seed is (or will be) a Metroid Prime + Monster Rancher inspired bot building game built around the STEEM blockchain and ecosystem. If you want to find out more about the project or how you can help check out our fundition page here. We are looking to fund a years worth of development and even just a dollar a month will go a long way to making the game a reality.