Workfiles & insights - Gamedev in TD first release

Dear friends, excusez-moi for the delay. The model didn't fit very well with the rig, so I needed to adjust the geometry, so had to redo the UV's and textures as well. But I think it looks a whole lot better than the earlier model.

I threw the collision with 'normal to camera' idea in the bin. I find it not very dynamic for further development. It worked quite well at first sight but it demanded to much power and I would like to keep things as light as possible. So I'm currently working hard on a descent collision detection system. It's almost there, but it involves so much math, it gets messy very quickly.

I basically put 8 points around the character that detects the difference in pixelcolor. I took the depthmap from the top which I already generated for the height detection. So you get this 'ring' around the character that moves along. If it detects a color difference of a specific span it detects a collision, so you can attach certain actions to that collision. Stop, walk sideways, back, could be anything. But it has to be watertight, I don't want to have these glitches where you get stuck in a wall, so it demands a little bit more time.

I've actually installed GTA3 again after what is it, 20 years? Omg I loved that game so much, and I really liked the 3rd person movement and camera reaction. So I'm sort of trying to copy that in TD. It will get there, I'm quite positive!

Small sidenote, perform mode freaks out when you have multiple screens with an extended desktop. You have to put your main monitor in single screen mode, duplicate mode, or just unplug one of them. There is a small script involved that puts your mouse cursor back at the beginning when you hit the end border and vice versa. This gives the mouse in gameplay mode an endless behavior, just with any regular FPS and/or 3rd person game. I somehow couldn't get it working with two monitors, it feels like a bug, but before I bother derivative with it, I just want to make sure. It works fine in non perform mode, but you'll hit the end of the screen eventually so you won't be able to rotate further. So for full screen gameplay, try one of the earlier mentioned solutions. If it freaks out, just hit ESC and it stops immediately.

I'm experimenting a lot with baked lighting. I'm not very convinced (yet) of TD being able to render everything nicely. It feels like it's not up for the task. So I use descent path tracers and bake everything into the texture itself. Of course this makes real-time reflections a bit difficult. But I have some ideas by animating the textures, or put some kind of animated filter over the textures that gives the illusion that there is real-time lighting/reflection involved. So many exciting options!

So hopefully you can already think of certain applications using this patch. If the character starts walking immediately after opening the .toe, just flick the big reset button on/off. It will reset the position and rotations.

As always, leave a comment or drop me an email for any questions. You're the ones who make this possible, thank you bigtime!

Best!

Updated workfile here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/workfiles-in-td-79230046