Snow Levels are Best Levels…

It’s been a long time… It’s two days short of a month since my last update. I didn’t make as much progress in that time as I would have liked. What I did accomplish though, still didn’t result in anything that makes for nice fancy screenshots.

Camera collision is finally implemented. The camera no longer clips through the terrain or world objects. If the camera detects an object between the player and the view volume, it will move the camera towards the player until the object is no longer obscuring the view. Unfortunately there is a bug I just found today with the pivot camera that causes it to jitter when you look straight up. The orbital camera is fine but I’ll have to revisit it. There is also a knock on affect that all trees and rocks that the player runs by now trigger the camera collision. Running through the rocks causes the camera to shift forward and back rapidly as the collision is trigger and untriggered with every rock you pass. Not sure what I’m going to do about this yet, simple solution is to just turn off camera collision for those objects but I’m not sure if that’s the best route.

I updated the jump/pounce mechanics slightly. Jumping now causes the player to leap forward a bit, in more of a pounce like move. On top of that there is now an animation that plays when a successful attack is made. Jumping also now rotates the player when they are in mid air to align with the “true sphere” of the world. This makes it more obvious that jumping is always opposite gravity. There was problems where jumping appeared to move the player in the wrong direction do to the players alignment with the terrain. This was just a perception problem and should hopefully be addressed with this fix as the jump will now force the players rotation to be horizontal to the gravity direction.

Needed a change from coding so I decided to see how some snow covered rocks would look. No specular textures on these like the other rocks for the moment.

Hopefully the next post won’t take 4 weeks.