A slice of TaleSpire
Update time!
This week Ree did more coding on the atmosphere system and then turned his hand to the GM Layer. The GM Layer is a view a GM can switch to see notes, hidden assets and other goodies that make running a campaign easier whilst also making sure it doesn't get in the way of gameplay.
Whilst there is a lot to do and it's just the start, here is a gif of the experiments with that overlay.
Right now it's only showing names but the other features are already in the works and there will be a writeup on those once it's a bit more fleshed out.
I've kept grinding away on the data side of things and the building is now working well at the data layer. I rewrote the tile & prop asset loading so that zones of the board can request loading of multiple assets as a single job and spread the instantiation of the tile visuals over multiple frames.
The reason for this is that there is a limit to how many tiles we can spawn per frame without slowing everything down to unacceptable levels. However, as board changes are going to be arriving from up to 16 people at any given moment we want to be able to apply all these changes to the local representation of the board without those delays.
To do this we have a data representation of the board we can update very quickly (even when the changes are very large) and then the game manifests those changes at its leisure. This isn't to say it will appear laggy, 'at its leisure' is still very fast for humans, but a slightly more leisurely pace for your laptop.
Ree and I also took another look at the tile cutaway effect. This one is super important not just to reveal the part of the building you are looking into, but also to cut down walls that would get in the way of controlling your creatures.
We found an issue in the approach we had chosen (and had seen other use) when the tiles have intersecting meshes. It's a simple problem but will make this post quite long so check out the dev post here.
Regardless here is a gif of a working approach (NOTE: this is not TaleSpire, it'll look good when we remake this for Unity and get real assets in there!)
Cool! Well, that's all for now. Thanks again to all of you who've been reaching out here and on our Discord channel, it's really fun to natter about this stuff with you all.
Until the next one,
Ciao.
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