Happy Noel!

Happy Noel from the Discretion team!

Noellephant says hello.

Libgdx efforts, and Chapter 1 almost feature complete!

Yesterday I did lots of tidying up of my codebase, bringing the bits I wanted to add to libgdx up to that project's standard. The end of the day saw me commit a lot of stuff - read the libgdx blog for what I got up to.

Today saw a lot more tidying up and polishing, with Chapter 1 looking almost feature complete, and a decent start to loading and saving. I'm very happy with my progress this week, and am looking forward to recruiting some beta testers in the near future.

Here's another screenshot! Look out for an introduction to the main characters soon...

Discretion's first pre-alpha screenshot

So, despite a crazy week which included getting stranded in the UK due to the bad weather, Google breaking ADT (rendering me unable to do any coding) with the latest Android release, internet outages due to our ISP and other setbacks, I've actually made some progress on the game! Enough that I'm willing to release this very pre-alpha, very basic screenshot of the main character and one of the party characters wandering around Atnar Castle. More will follow in the coming weeks.

Modelling with DeleD

Some thoughts on a workflow within DeleD, the world editor I'm using to build my levels with for Discretion.

1. Build world

2. Triangulate world (divide non-triangular meshes into triangles)

3. Apply materials and fix U/V mapping where necessary

4. Export

It's important to do as much modelling as possible in 1. before proceeding to the next steps, because the easiest way to ensure everything is triangulated once and only once is to select all objects then do triangulate. It's necessary to do 2. before 3. because U/V mapping a non-triangular polygon doesn't always work too well.

The Wavefront .obj exporter for DeleD has an extremely useful 'scale' option which allows you to model at the scale DeleD was designed to be used at instead of at real world (game) scale (mine is 1 unit = 1 meter which in DeleD is way too zoomed in). The triangulator in the exporter is broken however, so make sure you triangulate using the geometry toolbox instead.

Hope this helps someone!