Sunday, March 4, 2012

City Across the Sky 2.0: Week 9

SNOW

I'm working on some pretty serious stuff now. I've gotten more coded in the last 3 months than all of last year...and it's more efficient. Optimizing the game for these weather effects is going to take some SERIOUS effort, but I've managed to boost the maximum amount of precipitation objects on the screen from like 15 to 35  on lower-end systems. My i7 2.2 Ghz laptop with 8 gig ram can manage about 300 weather instances at one time before it begins to lag.

SUN RAIN (before the darker clouds were established)

Currently, I'm working on establishing quite a few things...

  • Weather effects (I have, rain, snow, hail, thunder storm, and some atmospheric stuff, I want leaves and such as well).
    • I'm also working on a very simple day/night/in-between system where the BGs and tint changes based on a timer variable. The switch would take place during map transfers and not in real time, though the tint MAY change a bit if I can get it working right to hint at the changing times.
  • Optimization (I hope to reduce the total number of objects at any time by around 30 to 50%) The map in these videos was reduced from 1562 objects to 724. :D 
  • Writing a basic cutscene engine (For images and preventing movement during NPC important talks).
  • Fixing damage recoil
  • Adding enemies (last...combat is unimportant)
  • Mapping final locations (3 left to map...so about 2 weeks of continuous mapping)
  • Whatever else I figure I'll need to add...I'm nearing completion, so lots of story writing is left after this, but that's it...
Expect greatness. Ryan Huggins~