Morningstar Update February 2023

February was a brutal month for the company, with 5/6 of us affected by COVID in the first two weeks.

But despite that, we've made a lot of really good progress towards merging the two halves of the game mentioned last month into the new main branch on Plastic. 

You can see in the Gifs attached that the code which drives Buildings and Cliffs is now complete. 

This system will enable all the downsteam features such as interior/exterior checks, room sealing for temperature, and revealing the isometric perspective while characters are inside. 

That also includes construction states:

Blueprint -> Scaffolds & Materials -> Finished Building Part

This interface is our Map Editor at work, now user facing the highly complex back-end of the previously talked about "World Observer" system. 

The Map Editor is Morningstar's answer to the Save Our Ship Creation Kit we released with that mod, enabling us to author ships within RimWorld's runtime environment. Here we are using Unity, but the grey test scene you see here will work just like the SOSCK. This will allow players (and modders and developers) to save out buildings as blueprints that the procedural generator can call upon to place in towns and event locations.

This is a mockup of how the feature will work. 

Instead of leaving our ProcGen towns up to the whims of the algorithm, we're putting the tools in the hands of us developers. We can create a whole town on the grey abyss, and set each Footprint as a location for the Blueprint of a single random building. We can also tag the Footprints to only spawn a class of blueprints, such as workshops or houses, so the town makes sense when you encounter it.

Because this tool takes out a lot of the most frustrating parts of design and authorship, we can rapidly deploy many hundreds of building configurations, characters to act as guards and soldiers, paths they follow, etc. balancing these will also be much less of a nightmare compared to traditional ProcGen towns like you see in RimWorld or Minecraft, where the people who live there need to eat and end up starving to death due to imbalance, or a town is split in half by a random canyon with no respect for the topography or layout. 

But we still inherit the power of ProcGen in all the randomization of available terrain and visual appearance. All while we can inherit "does this town have the baker it suggested existed from its World Map description?" 

And even more powerfully, we can save and load this part of our open world 2d environment whenever we want to. You can leave and close the map, and come back to it later, unlike other games in the genre. 

Allegra also wrapped up our upgrade of the 3d asset pipeline, so we now have a finishing touch on those art assets to get them ready to go in game.

The option to go back and add animated elements to these is still on the table. We'll tackle that later in development as the game matures, however, and we see just how necessary it is. A few assets animating will be fine. Some just don't need it, as the characters come up and do a job with enough work activity anyway.

These have all been color masked as well, so we can apply special touches as we make each area unique. Players also should be able to custom paint these too, helping with organizing their workshops visually.

"This is my hospital for the citizens, this for prisoners, this for visitors," etc.

"This is the workshop making weapons in red, the medical supplies in blue," etc.

We also added new Ropes and Fences. They will be used to organize your stockpiles and corral animals. 

We're also starting to expand on things like Signage. Further helping make the fairly block world more recognizable. 

We will also be returning to these old building concept arts to begin looking at way to capture that same vibe in the more conservative art style we now employ.

This style limits us in some ways while freeing us in others. 

The modularity means you as the player get to experience a vastly complex world with very simple rules. The tradeoff is that the simple rules constrain our art style to a kind of cubism that isn't quite natural. 

We can't have sloped roofs, for instance, since our roofs need to tile in any possible direction. (Yet! We will experiment later on with angled/pitched roofs. No promises though as it may not work worth with the existing kit.)

Speaking of the kit -- James implemented a system we'll be using from here on for storing height data for objects in this cubic volume. 

Previously, we only had the ground level to think about. But, we want to attach things to walls, and flying creatures need a method of being hit.

So now our system can track the whole cube of a tile, not just the 9 at the ground level. 

Tracking projectiles and their raycasts and collision is a job for this month, while Curtis wraps up merging his terrain, buildings, and other details.