Health Bars

Every time that I implement a new feature, it has been an opportunity to learn a little more about the engine, and how to use the tools that it provides to do fun new things with it.

In the last two days I have added health bars for both the player and the enemy. They are implemented as "billboards", which are 2 dimensional images that always face directly at the camera. This is fairly similar to how I had previously implemented them in 2D, and it isn't overly complex to implement, as it turns out.

I have also started learning particle effects, thanks to some great tutorials from Gabriel Aguiar on YouTube. This can already be observed in the prototype, if you download it and play it.

Above you can see some work in progress, with the new health bar making an appearance. You won't see the action from this angle during play, as the camera looks down towards the player. If you're wondering why I bothered to add a sky with clouds... well, I'll save that one for a future dev log.

Once again, I have to give a big shout out to Tokisan Games here for the Terrain3D plugin for Godot, which currently works with Godot 4.1.3 or higher. They built it for one of their own games, but they've made it available on GitHub for everybody to use in their games.  It does terrain sculpting, with fewer bugs than Unreal's own terrain tools, with slope-based texturing, texture scaling and orientation, variation effects to prevent that "tiled" look, collisions and navigation. Apparently, they'll be adding vegetation as well, at some point in the future. It instantly became my number one plugin for Godot! Since it drops into your project's addons folder, it goes right into your source control repo as part of the project, which means your whole team always has the right version of it to work with. If you have a team, of course.

Some of you will probably recognize the character model from Mixamo, which I'm using for the prototype, as it was easy to animate using Mixamo's library of animations. Blender makes it easy to pack all of those animations into a single GLTF file for Godot that also contains the mesh and skeletal rig. For the final game, I have an original character from an old friend of mine, who is far better at Blender than I am.

It still blows my mind just how amazing 3D looks in Godot 4+. I miss some of Unreal's special effects, but they came at the cost of extremely poor performance, large amounts of visual ghosting around objects in motion, excessive blurriness of textures in motion, and shockingly high amounts of VRAM used for textures, to the point where it exceeded the 8GB in my video card. I just don't see any of those problems with Godot 4 at all.

I had been enjoying Unreal's Blueprint system as an alternative to writing code, but I think I was spending even more time watching tutorials to make that happen than I spend with doing the same in GDscript. I did briefly enjoy using C# in Godot for my scripting, but the papercuts of using that approach quickly began to build up. Especially when you try to add signals in C# and they don't quite line up without some manual intervention that isn't needed at all with GDscript. GDscript isn't perfect, but I like it, and it works.

I haven't been making Linux builds since I moved to 3D, but it's still possible, and I may start doing it again. I'm reminded of Last Epoch making a Linux version available right from the very beginning of early access, only to eventually let the Linux version rot a bit by not fixing some bugs that weren't technically showstoppers. Hopefully they actually got it fixed for the final release, which is out now, and pretty good. If I actually do Linux builds, I want to test them properly, and fix the bugs that crop up, instead of letting it rot for a few years. Since I'm not working in Unity, like Last Epoch uses, I expect fewer such bugs, as Godot feels very much like a first-class citizen on Linux.

I now have most of my Perforce issues ironed out, and my shift from Git to Perforce is complete for source control. It's been quite a cultural shift, requiring a mental rethinking of everything about source control, but I feel it will pay off.