And we're back.
It seems all I needed was to take a break from this for a while and deal with.. you know.. having coronavirus. This has not been an easy week for me, and the only way I got through it was some good luck and cutting everything except rest and survival out of my schedule. Feeling better now at least.
Enough about me, let's get back to what I was working on before all this: Props. To review from part 1: we can add non-interactive, decorative 2D sprites to a level to help compose our image and set the mood. I've added a Z coordinate plane to the game logic system which allows any arbitrary N number of layers of props to give depth perception. Before this I was just using a simple quickly sketched placeholder static 2D image as my background. Now, with props all I really need to do statically is the sky color. The rest of everything you see in this scene was created programmatically. There is a lot going on in this scene, probably too visually crowded for a real level but it serves to demonstrate the feature.
Where I was getting stuck was some advanced visual effects that give even further control over the way these appear. For instance, I was trying to create a system where objects further away in the Z plane get scaled down and closer ones get scaled up. And for some sprites this worked beautifully. But for others it resulted in unsightly vertical compression and I could never get to the bottom of why. I am hard stuck on these features and I eventually have to swallow my pride and leave these features for later. The show must go on. If anyone is interested in contributing feel free to take a closer look I'll be posting a bug about it on the Github repository.
Next I am going to start putting characters into this build, which is going to work a lot like obstacles do but with collision detection. This is really one of the most computationally expensive parts of any game so it's worth taking the time to make sure I've got the right data structures and the right algorithms at work here. Stay tuned for how I approach that problem in Valkyrie.
“having coronavirus along with my wife but still having to care for our 3 young children.”
I read your previous post before from April 4 where you were ‘keeping things real’. You didn't mention (or maybe I missed it somewhere) both you and your wife had coronavirus. Anyway, sounds like you're mostly OK now. I only bring this up because some of us would have been supportive (in comments) if we had known. Again, maybe I missed your mention of it.