Devlog - April 10th 2022

Spawner data injection system & tech demo preparations

This week’s focus was getting as close as possible to the next tech demo. For that I did rework the UI overlay when looking at objects since it covered too much of the screen and also negatively impacted the immersion of the game. I did move the object name to the bottom edge of the screen and moved the interaction text info to the bottom left of the screen. With nothing but the crosshair in the middle of the screen remaining I think the immersion is much better now. This new UI will certainly be looked at again in the near future since it’s not quite what I would like it to be but it’s good enough for the time being. I also extended the system that spawns items inside furniture. To make this system more flexible I had to work on a new subsystem that dynamically injects data into the spawning algorithms. This needs to be done in order to make future bug fixing and maintenance of spawners easier as the project grows. This for example allows for the same algorithm to be used for a wide array of spawner use cases requiring only that one spawner flow to be maintained and looked at for potential bugs. Data such as how many objects, which objects etc. are now dynamically injected into the algorithm based on the furniture piece and even context. The addition of contextual data injection opens the future possibility to inject different data for the same piece of furniture (like a shelf) depending on the room/context it resides in. This allows for example to inject specific items to be placed into the same shelf that is in the bathroom and different ones in the bedroom while using the same underlying placement logic. I also exposed this system to the modding system which means tweaking the data to inject can be done by simply changing values in the respective text file in the game data folder. To utilize this new data injection I started replacing the old spawners with new ones. Unfortunately this added a bug somewhere that currently breaks the saving/loading. This needs to be investigated and fixed before I can finalize the last pieces of the demo and provide it to testers. This means it will certainly not happen this weekend. I do hope to have it fixed and ready for the next weekend but since I don’t know yet what the problem is I can not say for sure that I’ll be able to achieve that. Providing a tech demo using the old spawners also doesn’t make sense since that would include testing outdated tech and not testing the new one. I’ll be doing a short mid week update if and when I managed to fix the bug to state if a tech demo is achievable for the coming weekend. Finally I also did some more work on the visuals, mainly improving the building exterior textures and added a few remaining systems to the saving system such as the player attributes (hunger, thirst etc.) and the time of day.

Notable tasks this week:

• Refactored spawner data injection system
• Updated many old spawners and integrated with new data injection for easier maintenance and extensibility
• Extended furniture inventory items spawning
• Extended saving system to include furniture open/close state, player attributes, time of day and world seed
• Reworked object hover UI
• Further improvements to visuals

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.