The Conjurer's Curse
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MikeCL Yes. I do want to do demo for this game. Whilst the first release will have a campaign to it, It is an "arcade" style twin stick controller gameplay so good for a demo dungeon or two.
Alas, this is being developed in my spare time now so it's difficult to make quick progress. That said, I've got the core of the background threaded dungeon generator working. UI and inventory sort of established and am steadily adding creatures and puzzle constructs.
Another update video. Smitten with the audio streaming classes in Godot at the moment.
So noisy!
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Duckocide Something should be done about that lantern. The stick heavily competes for attention with the sword in the overall character silhouette, and the lantern creates a really nasty visual tangent with the sword.
The other visual thing that bothers me is the lack of any visual accents in the environment.
neat looking game, the wall/floor texture is very detailed.
the environment has a good look so far. I agree with XYZ that its similar/emptyish as you move thru the world. I think if the lantern "did" more it would feel better without adding too many objects. If you could keep the brightness around the character as it is but make the walls and distant objects darker until you and lanturn illuminate the area, it would create more color depth and keep your eye from following the walls/halls/angles.
Hi All. So, it's been a while but thanks for all the feedback. It is all taken onboard and helps stoke the procrastination fires of gamedev :D
A short video to hopefully show some more progress. I've now moved to 4.3 which threw a few curve balls in the mix for unpicking. I have to say as well my multithreading needs tuning since the version change. I'm getting a lot of audio crackle now (I moved to the new playlist and interactive 3d audio streams and ditched my bespoke coded versions of). Anyway, as ever, I post a video from time to time on twitter (X):
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Something should be done about that lantern. The stick heavily competes for attention with the sword in the overall character silhouette, and the lantern creates a really nasty visual tangent with the sword.
Yep, annoys me as well. Player animation needs some work but there are several types with many animations therein. The "environment" is just a lot of box rooms and corridors at the moment. As I implement each of the room types (there are over 30 types easily from halls to armouries to kitchens, etc etc.), the evolution of procedural geometry, decoration, puzzles and such will generate uniqueness. I've got a lot of "props" to go in that will improve things for sure. Focus is trying to lay foundations down for dungeon, levels and rooms therein (easier when it's just boxes for the moment
I think if the lantern "did" more it would feel better without adding too many objects. If you could keep the brightness around the character as it is but make the walls and distant objects darker until you and lanturn illuminate the area, it would create more color depth and keep your eye from following the walls/halls/angles.
I've been tweaking (learning!) the lighting systems in Godot of late. Finally realised that lower attenuation means greater "light" and more dramatic fall off. So, I'll use this to help the lantern "light". Also, the dungeon is lit procedurally with some "ambient" light prefabs. These are colourful (coz I love colourful arcade style games) and so very artificial in throwing "blobs" of light colour around. As it's procedural with a hint of randomisation and grouping, some rooms are invariably better than others but I think for ambient lights it works well.
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Duckocide You should completely remove the lantern. If you can't live without a light source being visible at that position then at least eliminate the thick stick it's hanged onto. Make the light source into something that just floats in the air, like a jar of magical fireflies or a luminescent albino imp.
Yay, I've managed to get back to some more godot c# gamedev. So here's another short progress video. Collectable loot / gold. Also (not on the video), procedural dungeons can now be vast multi levelled explorations with some rather fun spiral staircases joining the levels.
I'm using a lot of node swapping (add/remove child processing) in and out of the tree now to keep frame rate up (100's / 1000's of nodes when level's and props are procgen'ed). I'm guessing this is normal as I can't see another sound way of telling the engine to ignore nodes from main thread processing when not relevant.
Also, I notice the engine pauses a little when new relatively complex node scenes are instantiated. I've developed some instance caching abstractions (A cache library of packed scenes and subsequent instances marked as reusable). So a re-use node from the cache is much quicker than a new packed instance one. But I'm at a bit of a loss on how to avoid or tune new instance load when adding to scene tree. You can see it a bit in the video just after the start. The cauldron's that appear are quite complex and the game engine pauses while it instantiates them from a preloaded packed scene (they are cached there after so once dead, the instance can be reused with better performance).
Thanks
So I think this is likely the issue: ([https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/90400]) relating shader building behind the scenes (hogging CPU etc and causing stutters). A couple of great videos from the TPS demo showing what is I think happening to my project (I didn't use the TPS demo as a starter but have a lot of specialised shaders for screen/game effects).
I'm already using resource loader caching as well as my own scene (prefabs) instance caching (popping things in and out of the tree etc only when needed).
So, I'm looking forward to 4.4 to see if things improve further and see if it is shader build related.
I little more progress...