Friday Lights

Getting Real

It is great to be away from a prototype and into the main engine. It has been some time since I really got my hands dirty inside the FPSC source code and it is all coming back to me, and really how complex the whole process of building the map actually is.  Lots of considerations that seam completely natural at the front-end need plenty of code to make it a smooth editing process.  Of course there are some bits of code that are quite shocking, and are scheduled to be removed and rewritten at some point.

Current Progress

I managed to get segment painting working with adding multiple lights this morning, which was great to see, and even fixed a texture issue which means you can light map the same object over and over.

I was going to make a screen shot for you, but then decided the current code was obsolete as it assumed the objects needed recreating each time something was added. The old system did this using instance objects, but the new system does not require this traversal. Simply adding and removing the object at the point of the event is sufficient, but it meant removing a chunk of legacy code, and as I write this I dun broke it. 

No worries though, it has to get worse before it gets better. The new system will mean that as I increase the map size to 200x200x20, the engine does not have to traverse every single map reference to check if a grid tile has been changed (which would have been the case had I kept the old system). The new one will create the object on demand.  Right now it is perhaps creating it, but bot showing it in the right place. Going well though!

Signing Off

My hope for the end of Friday is to be able to draw a simple Alley scene comprising segments and static entities, then drop in a few lights and watch as they auto light map. Then to be able to remove both segments and entities and when I add a new light the scene amends itself.  I am not aiming to get light mapping to trigger on segment and entity removal just yet, as I want to make sure the "add/remove light" trigger works 100%.  Currently having a ball, and it's nice to see FPSC take a few tentative steps into the future :)