Devtober Day #15

Welcome back to Day #15 of Devtober, in which we finish up the heat system (at least for now).

A bit of a longer demo video today to make up for being too sleepy to make one yesterday, this time showcasing the heat system. There's honestly not much to say since I've also detailed the specifics of the system in my previous devlogs, but at least it's good to see things in actual practice. 

A new change to this heat system, however, is in the concept of melting objects. Previously, this just entailed rapidly deleting voxels from the grid the instant it got too hot, but I've changed it since then to be a bit more lenient.

While it is necessary to reach smelting temperature in order to melt down ore chunks in a crucible, items like ingots and smithing grids will show a bit more adverse effect if they remain too hot for too long. While there's a bit of leeway in how long an object can last above smelting temperature before they begin to melt, once that timer is up, that item is more or less gone for good. The smithing grid's melting functionality is actually still a bit unfinished, as it's actually supposed to melt individual voxels one by one instead of melting all at once, but I'll make sure to implement that bit tomorrow as well.

Either way, do be careful to not let your items get too hot!

In the future, I'd like to add some nice glowing shaders to both heatable items as well as the forge depending on their level of heat. Currently, everything kinda just has the same brightness level, so introducing more variations should prove to make the experience quite a bit more immersive. Of course, figuring out how to do lighting stuff is probably going to take ages, so that'll be more of a polishing step than anything.

Tomorrow will likely entail a bunch of bugfixing and tying up loose ends before we can finally get starting on the pattern system, which will govern the outlines the player must fill out in order to actually complete the smithing process. Since this system is heavily focused on data management such as saving/loading, I expect it to probably take me quite a while to complete, especially considering that I can't really half-ass it as I did in the demo version.

That'll be an issue for future me to tackle, though.

Poor sap.

Anyway, that's about it for now. 'Till tomorrow,

- Ian, Lunarium Works