April 2022: User Interface Shenanigans, Part 3: "Oh hey it's actually turning into something now"
Alright, alright, I’m fashionably late by five days. Did it work, do I seem more fashionable? No? Anyone? Ah…
Lame jokes aside, what’s up guys? So the reason I’ve held off on this blog post until now is because I wanted to finish some features and get a teensy bit more done before making this, so that I could talk about it a bit in this post! We’ve been continuing our work on the Robot Farm collision system, and I’ve personally been continuing to expand our UI tools and began work on adding a basic UI to our World Editor. I don’t want to have to spend too much more time on the World Editor before I move onto gameplay, so from here it shouldn’t be much longer.
So what’s left to do on the World Editor?
As you can see above, I have some basic footage of one of our work-in-progress World Editor menus. This is the one for editing Map settings. In Robot Farm, each World file (a sort of master file for a world and its story) is made up of smaller Maps, and the World itself handles linking these together and managing them. So this menu in particular will be for editing stuff like the Map’s lighting and effects.
This is just one of the few menus we’ll be needing for the World Editor. Back before the editor had a UI at all, I made our tech demo levels by actually live editing the code itself to tweak the values - which really isn’t that time efficient, nor is it feasible when we start bringing level designers on.
So I’ll be adding menus to the World Editor like above, but they’ll be limited to settings that take some fine tuning to tweak. For other, more rudimentary features, I’ll mostly be configuring them to be used and activated with various hotkeys. This should help me with the development time so that I can turn my focus to the gameplay soon.
However, you may ask, “Why did it take a whole month just for this?” I’ll explain.
Building up additional SDCUI tools
So last month I mentioned that SDCUI was nearly complete, or at least the foundation. That’s true! However, more needs arose as I began adding UI to our World Editor. Things such as titlebars, being able to have a “windowing” system for the menus, being able to tell the UI to disable hotkeys when a menu is active, being able to switch out a menus components for other components with a button press. These are all things you can see in the above video that weren’t in the system the last time I checked in.
Fortunately, the foundation I built was specifically designed to support major additional features being added like this, but it still does take time to make these. And the good news is that I actually do think I have everything that I’ll be needing, working now. I’ll be whittling away at these world editor menus and hopefully have them all done in one or two weeks.
From there, I need to add some features for placing entities, and then away I go onto gameplay.
On the collision handling side of things…
To give a brief update our collision systems, my co-programmer has been continuing his work on it in the past month and has made considerable progress; in fact, I’d say it’s nearly finish. It’s a pretty neat system really: it’s capable of generating all the physics models automatically from the models used for rendering - so you don’t have to supply any physics models or even collision metadata in the Magic Image. Which means less work for us and less work for the modders. Just plug your voxel model in and it’s ready to go!
From here, he’s got a handful of things left to do before we’re good to go on gameplay. Mostly to do with walking near stuff and being able to interact with them. But between his progress on the collision and mine on the World Editor, we’re about primed and ready to make some of that sweet, sweet gameplay.
Time hit the ol’ dusty trail!
Alright guys, I’m gonna close it out there for this month. It’s been a long day for me already and I have a few more errands to run. But it’s always fun to check in and write down what we’ve been working on! It’ll make for a cool timeline of Robot Farm’s development someday.
As usual, you all have a great month and I’ll be seeing you again at the end of it!
From your robot samurai friends,
♥ NOKORIWARE
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