Yes, I know I promised a Coding with a Grain of Salt this week. I got called into work. It’ll be up Wednesday. Damn it.
Coding
Serenity Crater is completely mapped and 50% scripted. I decided to add more world stuff to examine and characters to talk to, really brings the place to life.
I’ve also added automated texture atlasing to the program. It only actually applies to the sprites. The atlasing is not meant to improve VRAM usage, it’s meant to improve loading speeds, which it does only in the case of sprites. It also improves rendering speed, but Pandemonium has never been rendering speed choked.
I can’t do statically sized atlases because the texture size is limited based on the user’s graphics card and I don’t want users on older machines to have problems. You have to toggle atlasing on, and it only boosts loading speed by about 0.4 seconds. That adds up when you’re like me and run the program 100 times an hour, but I expect only users on older equipment will notice more than 1 second gain.
Art
Hund is working his way through the combat animations. They’re starting to come together. I’ve also updated the combat sound effects using stolen borrowed sounds. They make combat a lot more fun to observe, and it flows much more nicely.
Chicken is most of the way through the Golem TF, and also got us some updated Mei Zombee sprites. The new UI requires full-sized portraits, and Zombee never had one (because Mei cannot enter combat during that sequence). Well, now she does. Patrons will get to see it.
Urimas is currently working his way through the running animations. I’ll be posting some gifs of those next week. They look pretty darn great and really make the game come alive.
Other Stuff
I’m going to outline my project targets in next week’s post. No, we won’t be doing Prototype 5-2 this month, it will probably be in May.
Pandemonium Development 