August 29th Weekly Update (Patreon)

Had a fairly busy week making changes and adjustments!

Based on feedback, the simpler menu based spell casting seemed to be more popular.  SO I spent a lot of time getting that updated to give you more information, and to knock out a few bugs it had.

It will now tell you the cost of each spell, as well as show you how much magic of each type you have. 

My next fix will be to have it give a bit of a spell description as well.

Now that I've got the magic stuff down, some of the spells I'm taking a bit of time to go back and make more utilitarian.   For example, the bomb spell I've adjusted to give it more use as a trap, or even a light source.   It will now not detonate until it is thrown or dropped, and something( an enemy, a bullet, thrown object, etc) touches it.   I'd really like for all the spells to have out of combat uses, and more interesting uses IN combat.

The bomb gives off a glow and can be used to light your righteous way.

As you can see from above I've also been working on another more cave like area.    I'm going to be working on some simpler puzzle elements for this area.  I'll show more as its farther along!

I did a lot of optimization stuff as well.   Enemies and objects all previously had detection radiuses that would look for the player.  I've been rewriting things to not need them, as it would save some CPU time to not have to check each one every frame.  They were finally disabled.  It wouldn't be a huge difference, but little stuff can add up.   

Like wise I've adjusted some characters to use instances of the same materials instead of their own unique materials, and that should help a bit on draw calls.

There is a new version of Zbrush just released with some wonderful new tools ( so long trim curve, hello Knife! ).  I took a bit of time to learn the new tools for that this week as well.

I also did some miscellaneous tests on some various other things that I want to include as well.

Not quite there yet....

That's about it for me this week!  I hope everyone stays safe and has a great week!