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The reason I called the third location “Sandy Whites” was to get some 3D Ant Attack references in. Sandy, and his then girlfriend Angela Sutherland – who modelled the environment – arguably made the first survival horror game, and the visuals always stuck with me. I didn’t manage to squeeze it into the first game, which was a bit of a crime, so my idea this time was to create a series of rooms based on their map. I was about to model it with Cube Grid, but my first Duck Duck Go turned up a full 3D model of it. Some crazy internet person, “cstroeh", not only dumped the map, but created an OpenSCAD model of it. Their write-up is really interesting.
So I grabbed the model. It needed a fair amount of cleaning up – every block was a teeny bit larger than a unit, not sure why – but it saved me a lot of time, and I ended up with the full map as a nicely broken down model, that I could break apart, remodel, and use as a template.
Rather than do a collection of rooms, I’ve decided to have one big one, showing the full Antesher map. The trick is making sure there’s plenty of stuff to do in there, so I’m slowly working my way across each bit, remodelling bits, making the odd change, and deciding what could fit where. I’m going to make this the room where you (finally) get the camera unlock, so you’ll have to spin the camera around to see all the nooks and crannies to unlock all the bits.
First problem: I wasn’t expecting rooms to have more than 64 paint collectables, and this, clearly, is going to have a lot more. I use bitmasks to track if things have been collected, so a single unit64_t isn’t going to cut it. Easy enough fix; the GameState and save game classes now take a struct holding four 64 bit integers. 256 paint pickups should be enough... (Another reason why I always do the save game last.)
Second problem: My paint pickups were being culled faaaar to quickly. Seems the engine bins small transparent objects after a few hundred meters, so I’ve made them opaque and fettled their blueprint so they’re not included in HLODs or cull volumes.
Third problem: Yellow on yellow isn’t working (obviously) so I’ve had to make a new particle effect for the Wand charges and change the colour of the wand platforms. This is a massive pain in the arse, cos I’m locked into yellow after the first game and I really don’t like changing it for this map. It breaks everything I’ve been saying to the player up to this point.
I could change the colour across the entire game but… meeeeh.
Dropped a couple of little puzzles into Antesher, and I think the super large room thing will work out. Lets see how I get on tomorrow.
Starting to feel fairly happy with Antesher. I’ve still got a fair amount of the template model to replace / tweak, but it’s getting there. Added a Boom Box that you unlock with some buttons and pushblocks, and a carry duck, over deadly water. The latter’s a bit of a repeat of what I did in Willy’s Mansion (The Back Door), but it fits.
Asked around and got the contact details for Sandy White and Kevin Toms. I’ve asked Sandy for permission to use Antesher, cos I don’t want to lift his work wholesale without permission. My fallback plan is to remodel it so it’s reminiscent, but it’d be super cool to have something really close to the original. Fingers crossed. Sent Kevin a video of the Space Toms level, although I’m less worried about that. His face was all over magazine adverts back-in-the-day, it feels like fair use.
The main directional light in Willy’s Mansion is flickering again. This has been a recurring problem for a while, even in packaged builds, and it’s the only map in the game with the problem. I’ve had a couple of attempts at getting to the bottom of this, including today, where I’ve waded through hours of crappy videos, and trawled the web. I’m still none the wiser. It’s definitely something to do with the Ray Traced Shadows, as disabling them seems to fix it… but the cost is, the shadows look shite! Setting it to static seems to fix it, but I’m not baking the lighting… That’s probably my “ship it” fallback, but I’m starting to get annoyed that I can’t work out the what’s happening. The light setup in all the three maps is identical!
Tweaking the light’s source angle, and softening the shadows seems to have made a difference.
…
Took screenshots of the remaining rooms for Wil, and wrote him a little blurb about what I’d like for the key art.
Loaded up Willy’s and the light started flickering. So much for Source Angle. “Cast Cloud Shadows” is today’s fix. I will bet actual money that'll stop working. Probably tomorrow.
Made good progress on Antesher. I’ve got a few areas at the top of the map left to populate, but I think I’m over halfway.
Since it’d be rude not to have some ants running around, I grabbed an animated model from FAB, and created some simple movement AI. It’s extremely dumb - just tries to run in a straight line until it bumps into something - but it looks kinda cool. I’ve not decided if I’ll let it attack the player or not, as I’m enjoying exploring without getting hassled. The game’s pretty low pressure, I’ll probably leave them as they are.
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