dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Sorry for the second lapse in news this week. We had to visit the hospital yesterday to look at an injured knee, and we've been slowly getting back on our feet (both figuratively and literally). Everyone's safe, thankfully, and the injury might be mending faster than expected. So our fingers are crossed this was just a minor bump.

Hey Folks! Sorry for the lapse in news yesterday. I had a call run long, and then had to run for family stuff.

And today almost slipped, as well! Some errands late in the day, combined with some stuff I wanted to send out to unblock folks, meant I had to scramble at the last minute.

That said, I actually got a lot done this morning, and a fair bit yesterday. The screenshot today is a bit of a split-screen summary of that work.

Hey Folks! I'm sort of bogged-down with contracts and agreement stuff today, so I'll take some time to show-off more of Michael's latest stuff: Social Combat!

Today's screenshot shows a few milestones along the path of a conversation between Captain Alyssa and Crew Eric. We start with the view of the ship and participants at the top of the screen, and I slice relevant changes into rows below that.

Hey Folks! Tremendously productive day today, which is a big relief. Between vacation, family illness, and banging my head against some awkward shader math, I was really starting to stress out. However, I was able to check-in a bunch of stuff which was a welcome boost!

Hey Folks! Slower day today, as I discovered a rendering bug while working on auto-tiled walls. Also, with the family feeling sick today, I had to duck out frequently to help.

After a bit of email and admin stuff, I was back on my wall sprite rework, updating the complete wall sprite sheet's normal map. I fired-up the engine to see how it looked, and it wasn't too bad! But there was a problem: some of the highlights were in the wrong place.

Hi Folks! Hope everyone had a good week. I'm in the process of catching-up on the backlog of emails and office-related stuff that piled-up. And I'm nearing the top! (I think.)

What little dev work I did today centered on the auto-tiling feature. Namely, walls and floors.

Last week, I got the conduits mostly behaving as I wanted, and I'm pretty happy with how those turned out. I'd like for walls to do the same, and one possibility involved making the walls thinner than a full tile, to make them more directional.

Hey Folks! Just a short update today, as I had a work call most of the afternoon.

I managed to figure out the weird edge cases I was getting on the auto-tiling conduits, which turned out to be due to the way material instances are named. I had to force each new sharedMaterial to have a more sensible name, so that it would re-use the correct one when choosing. Conduits seem to be behaving now, and I've gone and replaced all the old hand-placed ones with the auto-tiled ones. So far, so good!

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours was very, very outdoors. And I've got my vitamin D quota for a long while, I think.

Back at work, I set about a minor task I've been meaning to do: add auto-tile ability to certain items. Namely, conduits and walls.

Up until now, if you placed a conduit, there were two pieces. A 2-way pipe, and a 4-way junction. I once also had an "L" shaped corner piece, too. And if you wanted them all to line up, you had to carefully choose each piece separately, and place them by hand.

Hey Folks!

I'm past due for another video, so here's what we've been up to!

So what's new?

More art! Belly landers vs. tailsitters! A new conversational UI, dismantling ships, and heat stroke!

Social Combat, Dismantling Ships, Health Effects, and New Art

Hey Folks! I apologize for the lack of news yesterday. I ended up running a bit long and had to leave before I could write anything up.

However, I'll be covering that work and more in tomorrow's video! I'm way overdue on the next newsletter/video, so I spent the day today recording game footage and talking about the stuff we've been up to since early June. It's a lot! And this might be the longest video yet. (I really need to start paring the duration down a bit.)