My girlfriend came early yesterday to see me! It was such a nice surprise. I was sitting waiting to call her, as we always call at around 7 PM, but I got a snap from her with her on the bus! She is just the absolute best and I couldn’t ask for anyone better.
As for GoDot, last night I managed to get convincing looking PS1 shaders working as well as learning a little bit about how texturing works. I know that shaders are a bit unnecessary, but it helps give immediate gratification and actual visible results. Compared to something like working on UI scaling or something like that which isn’t always immediately apparent, this is visually striking. I think learning things like this that are relatively simple to implement and that look great are things I should focus on. Embarking on long, drawn out tasks that give little results should be something I look at once I have more experience as I’ll have more patience with the program. Right now, my patience is understandably thin as it’s all still a bit confusing for me, despite GoDot intending to be an easy game engine. It is easy, yes, compared to other game engines it is remarkably user friendly. But there are still parts that I need to wrap my head around.
My next plan will be to learn how to make levels and world geometry PROPERLY. I come from the Source SDK background and I have made many many maps in that, primarily for CS:GO. I know in that engine that you should always use a grid of at least 8 or 16 for floors and walls, texture everything with nodraw that isn’t visible, use the slice tool and vertices tool for ramps, stairs and that sort of stuff, make all detailed brushwork func_detail objects, keep the map enclosed with skybox textures to avoid leaks, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I’m very competent with that editor. However, GoDot uses gizmos and stuff like that for geometry and is almost like Blender when it comes to moving, resizing and rotating geometry which I have never had to deal with before. Geometry can be simple plains in GoDot, something you never had in Source. Also, aligning geometry to a grid I have found very difficult because the edges of geometry do NOT match up with the grid. The center of the geometry will snap well to the grid, but the edges (faces) do not and this is the biggest hurdle for me. If I am able to map out areas like I did in Source then I’ll be able to make environments easily. It’s just the new grid system and gizmo resizing that I need to learn. At the moment, all of my geometry is misaligned and unevenly placed simply because of this curve that I haven’t gotten my head around yet.
Once I’m able to confidently build a level, I’ll probably focus on texturing and stuff like that. I have managed to just get a .jpg and put it on geometry easily, but I’ll see if theres a way to apply textures to faces individually. If I can’t do that then it’s okay, I can just apply textures to the whole thing. I will eventually need to learn more about window scaling because currently trying to resize the window, it drags the mouse inwards because of the way my FPS is set up.
I did some research on how Ville created the levels for Cruelty Squad and apparently he used TrenchBroom to block out the levels. This sounds a bit finnicky for me, as I need to import the map file to GoDot, but it sounds very doable and if TrenchBroom is anything like Hammer then I'm sure it'll be alot better than blocking out levels in GoDot directly,