Spent this month doing a bit of clean up both for the code and the assets. In general I think the game feels a bit better now.

Gameplay⌗

Highlights when hovering over students/staff/objects⌗

Highlights around the edge of entities

Added a highlight to students, staff and objects when you mouse over them to help being able to see which one you are actually selecting. Objects are only selectable when editing a room. The highlight is a different color depending on what is being hovered over.

The highlight is implemented by rendering the object in a solid color on a black background and then blured. The original solid color render is then subtracted from the blur to produce the outline. This was implemented based on this great video.

Gardens⌗

Added a garden that students can idle in whilst having a free period/waiting to register. You can place benches, plants, bushes, paths and ponds. I spent a bit of time trying to make the water to look good. Its currently a special case within the rendering due to way its animated but I’m hoping to generalise the case where models have custom shaders at some point.

Object menu redesign⌗

The new object menu

I decided to redesign the object menu to make finding objects easier. Whilst the old menu provided a icon for the object which this one is currently missing, this one provides groups and is able to fit more objects on to the screen without scrolling.

This also provides a button to hide all objects in the list apart from the objects required to complete the room. This should fix the issues some testers were having trying to work out what they were missing from the room.

Added more sounds⌗

Added some basic sound when placing (or failing to place) an object as well as removing an object. This just provides a bit more feedback to players when building rooms.

Models can now have attachments⌗

These objects can be attached to any bone on the model and will animate along with the model they are attached to.

Model additions⌗

Office worker and talk animation

Finally have an office worker model (RIP boxy the yellow box) and there is now an animation for students when sitting at the desk. Professors are also animated when teaching.

New science desk and animation/attachments

Science lab got an improvement with a improvement to the desk model, animations for students working and attachments for the students to hold.

Janitor with a broom

The janitor’s watering can was updated to be an attachment instead of a seperate model holding it. Also added a broom for the janitor to sweep with.

Tooltip when hovering over rooms⌗

Added a tooltip that displays after hovering over a room for a bit. Currently displays the name of the room as its not always easy to tell what room is what.

Selections render through walls⌗

Selection rendering through a wall

If a selection for a room ended up behind a wall it became hard to tell where the selection was going. Also if an object was behind that wall that blocked placement it would be hard to see what blocked your selection.

To fix this the selection now shows through walls whilst still showing whats behind it.

Graph improvements⌗

Redid the line drawing code for the stats screen. The line should no longer have gaps in it when the line is really steep.

Internal⌗

!Send/!Sync components on entities⌗

Previously I was using a seperate hashmap to store lua properties for entities due to the fact that lua isn’t thread-safe. This was hard to maintain as I would have to try and keep track when an entity stored in that map was removed.

The reason components required Send + Sync was due to systems being run in parallel when possible which while nice for performance did cause issues when trying to use components with properties from lua or opengl.

To fix this I removed the restriction on Send/Sync from components and instead moved it to the system. This prevents adding systems that access !Send/!Sync components whilst still allowing its use outside of systems either via the get_component(_mut) getters on the container or via Container::with to run a system inline.

Using slog for logging/unwrap removal⌗

println statements weren’t really cutting it anymore and its already pretty hard to debug when issues occur in release builds so I decided to start using slog and increase the amount of logging I do.

As a part of this I also removed every use of unwrap and replaced it with a assume! macro I wrote. Functionally assume! is the same as unwrap apart from when it fails. unwrap’s panics always show as happening in the stdlib which isn’t useful when you don’t have stacktraces enabled. assume! is able (due to being a macro instead) to attach the line and file of the caller instead, it also logs the file/line via slog so I can view the log file to track down the issue.

I’ve also registered a panic handler that also logs panics to the log file before forwarding to the default handler.

Minor things⌗

  • The initial level syncing is now compressed

    It was starting to get a bit large slowing down the initial load.

  • Increased the max packet size from 16kb to ~9mb

    Level loading was hitting the old limit so I reworked it slightly to support larger packets.

  • Rooms now have a place for scripts to store values between ticks

  • Entity script handles are no longer recreated every time its needed

    This previously caused a lot of preasure on lua’s GC by allocating a new one every tick.

  • The ecs got rayon support.

    This allows spliting up the work within systems.

  • Objects store their rotation when placed

    Whilst this isn’t need to render them correctly it does allow the script to re-use the old rotation when moving an object instead of starting from the defualt.

  • Lots of script bug fixes

Twitch⌗

I’ve been streaming my work on twitch here most days. Feel free to stop by and watch if i’m streaming.