Arborlands Dev Blog – May 2021, Week #4

Well, this is the fourth week of May. The minor achievement here is that this is the first month to have a full Four Dev Blogs for Arborlands! 🎉🌳🎉

It has also now been 30 days since Arborlands’ online launch, although it feels like it has been much longer 😅. But that’s ok, I like it when time slows down.

This week was fairly productive, although a lot of the progress is in-code and not particularly noticeable externally. Achievements enumerated below:

1. Navigation line chevrons

The lines for the planned navigation from last week’s blog are now replaced with a series of chevrons. As I stated in the vlog, I had wanted to give the player a clue as to what direction the route was going, but was having difficulty with the Unity LineRenederer. After asking a question in the Unity Forums, someone gave me a useful tip that led me to the solution (it was a texture issue).

I really like what the new lines look like and I’m glad I didn’t have to venture into the workaround I had in mind. I learned a lesson here that there was no need to venture into a workaround when I could just ask for help and work on something else while I waited for a response. Believe it or not it took a lot of willpower to stop myself from diving into the workaround! 😄 So I feel pretty good about that.

2. Navigation nodes under-the-hood

On Wednesday I spent a lot of time refactoring the navigation-planning code. The one-way and circuit routes had fairly different code handling them, but had many commonalities. I unified all the commonalities into the same methods in order to reuse code and keep things neat.

I also made the code less wasteful. Before, whenever a player changed the routes (by dragging the waypoints), the code was actually completely destroying the graphics for the route and re-creating new ones. This was happening multiple times a second 😮. Due to computers being super advanced these days, this was not creating a slowdown that was noticeable to the user. But it was at least symbolically wasteful and could have caused issues later on, so I fixed it. Now lines and nodes are not destroyed when moved, they are merely shifted as needed. They will only be destroyed when they are no longer needed (i.e. when the circuit is cancelled, or when a waypoint is reached).

Finally, there were some game objects that were not being destroyed when they were no longer being used. This, again, wasn’t causing a noticeable performance issue, but you generally don’t want a lot of objects cluttering a computer’s memory. If the game is played for a particularly long time, this could start causing slowdowns.

3. Dev logs are all caught up!

I started the web presence on April 30th (Arbor Day), but I already had 2 weeks worth of documented work to talk about. So, it took me a long time this month to complete my backlog of dev logs and post them. On Thursday, I finally did it.

From this point on, I’ll make an effort to post the dev logs on Sunday or Monday at the latest.

4. Resizing the current leg of a one-way

By unifying the one-way and circuit route code, I lost a feature: the leg of the one-way journey that the troop is on was no longer resizing as seen in last week’s video below:

You can see in the subsequent version below that the line was replaced with chevrons, but the leg of the journey the troop is currently on disappears:

This doesn’t look particularly great, so I brought back the current leg as a line of chevrons that shrinks as the troop travels. Check it out below and tell me what you think about it!

This feature required adding a new object just to track the first leg of the journey, but it was an acceptable result of otherwise more efficient code.

5. Hi-Res ground tiles and Arborian troop

On Sunday I re-imported some graphics. You may have noticed that the troop itself was woefully low-res before; that is fixed now. I also doubled the resolution of the land tiles, so they should appear more crisp now, although given video compression, I don’t think it will come through in the videos.

6. New graphical asset

Finally, I actually added some new graphics this week. I now have a new type of terrain – flat rocky earth. I also finally imported the animated spring seen in May’s first dev blog. So I can now place it in-game.

Watch the dev vlog to see the new assets in action! 👇

Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week. If you want to get more Arborlands tidbits during the week, you can also check out the Arborlands Twitter feed.