Back on Track

Well its again two weeks over and I am getting back on track to do stuff.

It's surprisingly hard to continue on stuff that you left for a bit.
Yes even 1.5 weeks is quite a lot.

And to be honest, I didn't feel like continuing on it because I was kinda stuck at that moment.     

Well I found other ways to continue on it without forcing myself to progress on something.  

First thing that got finalized that I started before the distraction came, was the color overlay for placement and fixed also a couple bugs.

That overlay was hard to decide to implement. I had either the choice to make 256 overlays but have only 1 per tile or have 8 overlays but I can have every single one at per tile. 

My first try was to implement was to combine both and use second byte to deliver which type was used.
That was a great idea but went really maintenance heavy, trying to keep track of it and the second byte could have been used for other features that might come.

So at the end I decided for the 8 colors but all at once allowing also some mixing.
Honestly once I thought through the cases where the overlay is needed and that's at best 4 needed at any given time. And its a allocation System where System requests a colorspace and then after its done it frees the colorspace again.

Next thing that happened was that shaders got improved in terms of extra lag that would come.
And these improvements are frightening. Shaders are weird to me. 

So what are these improvements.
(Correct me if i am wrong I am still learning those parts)

When you are writing your shader code you are not supposed to throw logic into it. Everything has to be resolved with math or functions.
If statements are basically a big no no.
From what I got told and looked up is that the shader duplicates the code and runs all versions that show up.
That slows down the gpu because it has to decide which of the produced results should be used after it generated them.

Lucky for me I had only 2 instances where I was using if statements but that got turned into math logic very quickly, again help from OvermindDL1 to get that hard topic into my head. 

It also cleaned up my shader code quite a bit, mainly for the reason math code is a lot smaller then logic code.

After that was done I started implementing actual Path-finding into my game as it was seen in the top GIF.

First of all thanks to Xaikii for providing a Arrow model to me for testing my path finding System.

This is now the A-Star Path-finding System that allows me to make paths from A to B with relative easy.
Its not the best implementation for Single pathing, but its a very good System to find any goal in its area of effect.
TL:DR Not good for single targets, but very good for mass target finding.

On top of that I made a good chunk of additions to that System to improve performance and reduce the amount of rechecking.

Paths can be saved, the Path Finder can quickly validate a path (like 100x faster then finding one), and caching the found paths are easy.

Outside of that, I was looking into modeling software that I was using before and trying to improve my understanding of them.   

On top of that thinking about animations, how I want to make the file format, how to make the handlers and other things reminding that.

Bugs that annoyed me for a good chunk of time were also fixed (spawner bugs for example).

And some features for a ModdingAPI was implemented. Maybe stuff that I will use internally to add features easier on the other hand its not needed right now. Yes I am planning to have a modding API.

Some tiny bit of research of networking, thinking about if I should also implement a multiplayer feature or not. Right now I think of no, maybe that changes but its interesting to say the least.

That covers the additions changes and other things. I am right now at a point where I am not sure what to do next and it might slow down the progress. Hopefully I break through it and get forward.

Thanks for reading, the next update will be again in 2-3 weeks from now.
I hope that i have next time more to show.

Speiger