Welcome back everyone.
Since last time various things have been developed. The most important one being the cutting tool, which will allow to easily import meshes from Blender and have them work into the game directly.
You can also see other important improvements like the post-process material, as well as some particles systems, like moth and and umbrellas.
But since videos speak a thousand words here they are:
(They all use the same music, which you'll probably want to turn off. I couldn't find out how to mute it by default)
This is how it works on this test model. The end result is "just a button". However under the hood the process also involves moving mesh pivots around, and making sure materials are correctly assigned. Cutting the mesh is done by geometry script. A second button transfers the results to static meshes - the white spheres at the start of the clip - which are then what is used by the main algorithm of the game.
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Here are the generated tiles for this small boat. Those "generated" tiles actually do not technically all exist in the algorithm. They are only there for debug purposes (DDH stands for Debug Data Holder) to quickly see if something went wrong. It is possible for mistakes to happen, as tiles have 3 sockets on each side. Here for example, the front left tile's right socket is compatible with the front right tile's left socket, which means that, if written like vectors, the former xyz is equal to the later zyx. Which is absolutely not obvious at all when tired.
One could ask if an edge compatibility approach would not have been better. Maybe. However the sockets allow to have a direction. That way you don't get 2 bows connected together and you can guarantee all bows will be connected to a stern.
The game only needs to know about the base tiles that have no rotation, and then it will just spawn them with the correct rotation. So only the 4 tiles at the beginning really matter. They are the same ones than those displayed around the base mesh.
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And here are the results. It uses sockets to find tile compatibility. The small boat is the set of tiles that are picked when surrounded by "nothing". The others are still placeholder meshes, but simply having different shapes like sphere and not just blocks helps a lot to get an idea of the "vibe" of the algorithm.
At the moment there are no vertical constraint so you can stack them up. But it is planned to have different set of tiles when building vertically (something about air balloons or similar).
That's it for this month! Happy summer everyone.
