Hello, dear Greenfeet friends! May the grass be soft under your steps!
Another very busy week passed as I focused on fixing and improving the rendering system. I couldn't manage to get back to the idling AI as I intended last week. So more on that next week, hopefully!
Unified depth system
The codebase converting the position of items, furniture, plants, and greenfeet had slowly evolved into a burning mess. It has now been completely rewritten. Computing depth is now handled by the same component for every in-game entity, and it has resolved many outstanding issues.
Plant patches
Until today, they were rendered as single images, which works well in most cases but not for patches of flowers or tall grass. From now on, plants can be split into multiple sprites so walking in the middle of a field doesn't look weird anymore.
Plant bumping
Moving entities will push and bend nearby plants as they walk around. Add that to the fixed depth system and plant patches, and you get a cool "greenfeet crossing fields" effect!
New flowers on the way
I wanted to have more vegetation diversity in the game, so I started drawing and integrating new flowers to replace the old "daisies" and "dandelions", which are very basic.
That's a wrap for this week, thank you for reading!
PS: don't forget you can wishlist Greenfeet Haven on Steam, so you don't miss when it's out!