Hello people! Binarin here.
This is the first development post from Night Node. They will be written by the programmers and they cover more technical things, like what we’re working with now and what problems we have.
While Joxe is making cool stuff in the backend, that I don’t dare touch, I can look at adding new things to the game. That is, as long as Crylar won’t bug me about adding his particles.
So I’m currently looking into how we can make our “planets” more unique. I’m using the functionality I added a while ago, that let’s planets override things like how the player moves and the normals of the surface. The aim is to have planets that can have any shape! Or at least planets that are not completely round, coz’ that would be boring. To try this out I’ve made a planet out of a cube.
After a bit of fiddling I got it to work. However, it looks silly as the player moves around a corner because there is no transition of any kind. I will probably make the player airborne as he walks over corners.
I’ve also tried making a planet that takes it’s shape out of it’s mesh. This turned out to be tricky, even if I managed to make a algorithm for making a 2D shape out of the mesh, I would have to save it somewhere. I could probably put the code in a custom unity editor to make sure it was only generated in edit mode, and store it in the planets serialization. But instead I think I’ll just take a array of Vector2s from the editor, that way we can customize the shape more freely without worrying about the mesh, and I don’t have to that 2D shape convertion… Like, where would I start? find the face to the left and follow it clockwise and save every edge? … No.
Joxe will probably write his own post from home some time this week. But he has done some nice work with Unity’s network library. We can almost play multiplayer without crashes again ~woohoo.
If you have any questions or just wanna talk, you can contact me on anton@nightnode.se. Have fun and keep hyping!
@CyberBinarin