August has been a bit different of a month. As a follow-up to last month’s difficulties, Alienware ended up shipping me a brand new machine (technically refurbished, but the manufacture date cites late June of 2024 — and it’s also more powerful — RTX 3080 to RTX 4090; i7-10 series to i9-14 series). I lost a little bit of time, due to setup/transitioning between machines (but since I’d already done it ~3 times in the last month, I’m quite skilled), but tried to keep some momentum.
Cue the music, maestro:
Elementals are finally in and working, this month. I wrote about them briefly last month, but got around to finally finishing implementation. They are applied via the Traits area of whatever you would like to include them in. You can also determine whether they apply as a User or a Target — e.g. you may want to have “Armor” that has a Fire property and absorbs fire — but you wouldn’t want to apply that same Fire elemental if you swung your sword (because Armor had the Fire property). Your overall effect of each is summed up and compared to other reactive Responses and then multiplied. Your overall effect is limited by what is specified as the Maximum in the Elemental. It sounds complicated, but it’s really quite simple.
For example, suppose you have two pieces of “Fire” armor that are rated at 70% each when assigned via Trait (and presumably only as a Target). Your overall rating for the Fire elemental is now 140%. Assume someone with a Fire dagger (Fire rating of 100% as a User) strikes you. Normally, it would do 10 damage to your HP. However, since Fire has a -100% Response to Fire (which is the default for all Elementals, but you can undo it), you end up healing 14 HP. (-100% Response x -140% Target Rating = -140% x 10 HP = -14). There is a lot of flexibility in this, and I’ve grossly oversimplified what it can do.
The next big update was to unify the shading pipeline for the engine. Before, the rendering pipeline could go in about three to four different branches. There is a single pathway now, with a few conditional operations (e.g. rendering Sky Spheres). This gave us volumetric fog that blends with our Sky Spheres! There were a few hiccups along the way, but they are mostly resolved as of writing this.
I finally also got around to implementing the Convex Hull collider. It’s still relatively new, so the paint might still scratch on it if you’re playing with it. At some point, I’d like to add some ability to import points from models. I think that’ll probably happen when I get to visualizing models in the editor.
Drag and Drop for Scripts has finally been implemented as well. This had been asked for for a LONG time, and it was on the roadmap — so it only felt right to handle it. I replaced the icon for reordering things as well, so that got a minor facelift.
Another request (from the Bertiest Maxiest) was to add Folders into the User Interface editor — and I did it! It’ll make organizing things much cleaner now. Effectively, folders will “flatten” when they are generated, so nothing really changes in terms of rendering. That said, you can choose to hide or show the entire Folder, which will update the items below — so it’ll be useful for debugging.
A number of bug fixes and other feature enhancements were made, which likely weren’t worth noting, but you can see in the change logs on Steam. We are still hard at work behind the scenes on a Dungeon Crawler template.
We hit 1,000 subscribers on YouTube this month! Bert has done an amazing job with it so far — why not do him a solid and subscribe if you haven’t? There are nearly 2,000 of you out there, at this point (we are about 20 users shy of 2,000 at the moment) so I know there are some of y’all who haven’t subscribed!
Next month, I’ll be picking off more from the roadmap to 1.0. I think I grabbed two or three items off this month, which doesn’t equate to much progress. I’m not sure if we’ll get to 1.0 by the end of the year, but it’s not a priority — the goal is to make an awesome product and continue to build it into (mostly) perpetuity.
That’s it for August!
As always:
Thank you so much for your support so far. I’m looking forward to building this community further and giving you the engine you may not have known you always wanted!
