Image credit: ProbablyNot

21.12: December 2021 Devblog

Thursday, January 6, 2022

Written by: CosmicCoincidence

SS3D Build: v0.3.95l

Born too late to explore the earth.
Born too soon to explore the galaxy.
Born just in time to help make SS3D.

December Recap

We hope you all enjoyed your holidays and had a happy new year!

December was more active for us than some of our recent months. Maybe it was due to the holiday breaks, or maybe it was coincidental timing of multiple factors being completed in the same month, regardless we'll take it.

Appearance

Several improvements to the game's appearance have been made this month. This first one was voted for in a poll we had a while back in our discord. It's a cutout shader for insetting objects into the floor. Trying to lower a machine into the floor prior to this would clip the floor tile and machine through each other and any part of the machine that was below the floor would not be visible. We can now have machines that are inset into the floor thanks to Seteron submitting this new floor tile cutout shader.

Seteron once again tweaked our lighting by adding new shaders, new post processing, adjusted values, and fixed bugs. The old is a bit brighter, while the new emphasizes shadows more (this likly isn't final).

Seteron also improved our item icon renderer immensely. He improved the lighting/shadows, added an outline to the items, and fixed the bug causing our transparent and emission materials to not render properly.

A controversial change, CosmicCoincidence raised the height of walls to give more space for various mobs and machines while fitting within the height of a room. Before and after.

Connectables

This month we had a lot of progress on our connectables, which are an integral part of the tilemap system. Connectables are objects that connect from one tile to another in specific ways. CosmicCoincidence has been working on redesigning the connectables and is mostly finished now, but some things still may change. In addition to the document, Cosmic also updated most of the connectable models and created missing ones to provide with this design.

To prepare for the new (and complex) adjacency scripts that are required in the above design, Em3rgency restructured much of the underlying logic used by the adjacency scripts.