Work going forward. Slowly.
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This week I have no interesting solutions for problems to write about. The planning says I am supposed to work on sound effects that will give the player feedback upon picking up an object. Each kind of pickup object will have its own sound: coin, armor, light, painting, bear pelt and vase. Unfortunately I have not had time to start on these sounds, because I’ve been thinking about implementing pathfinding and dynamic lighting, as well as working on a task from earlier that has been creeping forward into this week because we feel the result was unsatisfying. This task I’m talking about is the designing of the carpet footstep sounds, which I have problems making distinguishable enough among the other footstep sounds while still keeping them convincing. I was keeping in mind that “it doesn’t have to sound right, it only has to sound good”, but I have problems anyway because it seems that the sounds have to sound realistic to sound right. The samples I use are recorded from grass because they have more character than the ones actually recorded from carpet. Since the wood and stone footsteps sound realistic, the ears becomes confused when the carpet footsteps don’t. So I’m basically still experimenting with different effects on the carpet footsteps and bringing in the opinions of my groupmates in the process. As mentioned, I have also put time into pathfinding and dynamic lighting. The lighting is implemented using code from another student. We have two main problems with this as implemented now. First of all, it is very slow. The framerate is visibly reduced a lot, which is obviously no good. Our first plan to amend this is to treat several straight wall segments as one long, hence reducing the number of calculations that have to be done. The second problem we have is that the lighting code is designed for strict 2D games, and our game has a slightly angled perspective. We have some ideas how to fix this, but we haven’t actually started implementing them yet. I reckon this will be one of those things that take way more time than anticipated. The pathfinding is also a bit problematic because of the way our level looks. We don’t strictly divide it into tiles, which if we use the pathfinding method we know, as is, our enemy will not be able to walk everywhere he should, for example close to a wall. We have to consider how much this actually matters and how much work there will be to solve it. Below is the waveform of one of the carpet footstep sounds; because pictures are very informative, I’ve been told:
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