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[Pemanent]

If you look at the stars and their alignment you can figure out the perspective from the ground. You can use this to calculate the celestial axis of the planet as well as the relative mass. Then if you take the overall area of the mountains and compare it to the mass of the planet (factoring in the celestial axis of course) you can determine that the planet is actually bending upwards toward the sky, thus it makes sense that the mountains would get higher on the picture plane as they go farther back. Its simple really. 

But its just placeholders so whatever.

Seriously though, looking good, nice progress!

[eigenbom]

Moonman's Xmas! GO PLAY IT!

[Ashkin]

Merry Christmas, Moonman.

[eigenbom]

wtf, how did u do that!> O_O

[Ashkin]

Secretly, I am a wizard.

[eigenbom]

Secretly, I am a wizard.

Actually its quite obvious how you did that, you simply reassembled my source, adjusted one of my many MAGIC () numbers, then recompiled and wham!

[eigenbom]

Mwahahaah!

[eigenbom]

Update: Today I started to figure out the block rendering system. Moonman, like Terraria, will have two layers of blocks, the current collidable layer and a background layer. Referring to my earlier mockup, I need at a minimum the following features:
- Draw full blocks, sloped blocks, half blocks
- Have a background layer and foreground layer
- Have a repeating texture on the blocks (in the mockup the texture is 2 blocks wide, making repetition a little less obvious)
- Context-dependence e.g., the blocks on the edge of the cave's back wall are rendered differently, giving a rough edge

I started to make some headway on this today, but I'll hopefully do a lot more tomorrow. Here's what I've got so far. Not too exciting to look at at the moment, but making progress nonetheless...



Once the above features are implemented, I'll move on to another part of the game, probably the actual mining system, but some further features I'll eventually add to the rendering system are:
- Tinting blocks based on sky colour
- Modelling light (shadows and ambient occlusion)
- Caching chunks of the world to textures
- Special effects (e.g., a glow for moonore)

thx for reading..

[JimmyJ]

The water physics video looks fun, it reminds me of Clonk, which is absolutely a good thing. 

[eigenbom]

Cool I hadn't seen clonk before. Its been around for 15 years, wow!

[JimmyJ]

It maybe worth checking out if these types of games are of interest to you! I've lost many hours of my life to it.

[eigenbom]

Yeh ill definitely check it out thx!

[eigenbom]

Update: Did a substantial amount of work today on the block rendering system. I now have a bunch of block sprite types:
- Simple: a block is drawn with an 8x8 bitmap (e.g., the stone wall)
- SimpleOriented: a block is drawn with one of four 8x8 bitmaps, depending on its orientation.
- Tiled: a block is drawn as with a tiled textured (e.g., the blue ground is a 16x16 repeated image)
- TiledWithEdges: As above but special tiles are provided for all the possible edge scenarios (all 16 of them!). You can see this in the background dirt tile.



In order to test this I also made an app for drawing blocks, below is a gif of me drawing a picture in it. You can also see the context sensitivity of the blocks as they change when I add adjacent blocks. They are both of the TiledWithEdges type.

[eigenbom]

raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

[eigenbom]

Update: Compositing background with the new block renderer ...



click for gif

[eigenbom]

Update: Three devlog posts in one day?! Anyways, I've been working a little on the block sprites, everything is still a placeholder, but I'm starting to like the look of it. I've got to resist adding complexity and keep the visuals as simple as my first mockups..

Screenshot time!





and a video!

[Ashkin]

This is beginning to look prettier!

[PompiPompi]

Hmm, it looks good, but I would like to see it with the characters in it.
I mean, if the background have texture but the characters don't wouldn't it look misplaced? I don't know, I am just asking.

[eigenbom]

Thanks guys. That's a good question PompiPompi, I added some of the characters and blocked out the textures for comparison -- I think both compositions work. Although its hard to tell at this stage what the final (dynamic) result will be. What do you think?

There's still the lighting and compositing to implement, as well as working out the palette.

[PompiPompi]

Hmm, I think it does look better with the textures. Also, there is no way to recognize what are the materials on the one without the texture. So I guess you know what you are doing. XD