Hello there!
Welcome to the fourth devblog of Beyond Technology. It has been 3 month since the last one.
The last one was in 2016 in fact, I want to wish everybody a happy new year!
Lets start with all the changes and additions I made to Beyond Technology in these 3 months.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
The first thing I did was trying to improve the performance of this game.
All the block textures are now cached in the VRAM of the graphics card, this will help with performance.
I also removed some calculations that didn't need to be carried out every frame.
DOORS AND FENCES
I added doors and fences to Beyond Technology.
The doors will open in the opposite direction of the player.
So if the player is left of the door, the door will open to the right
and if the player is right of the door, the door will open to the left.
I think you get the gist.
The fences will connect to each other if there are adjacent to another fence.
NEW TOOLTIP SYSTEM
The last system I had for tooltip was very basic, I could only display text for tooltips.
The calculations were off too, so the text was bigger than the background, which didn't look particularly good.
The new system is a component based tooltip system. So the tooltip of an item consits of an array of tooltip components.
Right now there are these components: TextComponent, ItemStackComponent and a ProgressBarComponent. The ItemStackComponent just displays the localized name of the item and how much items there are in the stack. There are some pictures of the new tooltip system working in the next chapter!
METAL CASTING
The big thing I worked on was metal casting. This will allow the player to mix different metals together and make their own alloys.
For instance: If player adds a lot of iron to the alloy, the pickaxe might be very strong and durable but might not be the fastest thing in the world. The color of the finished metal also is determined by the amount and which metal you put into the mix. This will allow for infinite possibilities!
This system is still not finished! I didn't have to much time in the last 2-3 weeks, because I had to study for tests and so on.
So here is what I have got so far:
The first thing the player will need is a graphite crucible, this will allow the player to melt the metal, that he found on the surface as small pieces or underground somewhere. This molten metal cools down so you have to be quick and go straight to a casting table. The casting table is the second part of the metal casting system. There are two items which have to be put into the table before you can use it! The first thing is the graphite crucible of course and the second thing is a mold with the shape you want. There are two buttons in the gui of the table. The upper one is used to pour metal from the crucible into the tank of the casting table and the lower one is used to pour metal from the tank into the mold (doesn't work yet).
