Vending First Pass
Behold, a scuffed recording of me installing and filling a vending machine. Sharing this raw footage immediately helps me realise what needs more polish. Market needs an ambient soundscape, door opening of the vending machine needs hand animations, the seats on the Batako truck need to not clip through the truck, etc. Anyway, what's going on in the video?
Vending
Above shows the progress made this week. Players can now install and fill vending machines. They can also set the price for each drink. I still need to work on adding the AI desires and have them react to price changes so if the player marks up prices too much, they won't want to make a purchase.
Not shown in the videos is that players can also collect money from the vending machines. Making a round trip each morning to top up drinks and collect money feels quite therapeutic already.
Once AI behaviour is properly implemented, I can enter bug fix and polish for the next build. We should still be on track for this to come before Christmas.
New UI
The UI is currently a mix & match of the new and old. I wanted the UI to feel a little cluttered and overwhelming for people looking from afar, but all needed info is there for players familiar with the game. A bit like looking in a girls handbag... Credit goes to Ruta here for portraying the look and keeping it period accurate.
Optimisation
I've rebuilt the player's home to be much better optimised. So any work at the home garage now should feel a lot smoother.
A much bigger win for optimisation is discovering that a shader was breaking SRP batching. I've resolved this shader meaning it's fixed a rather large bottleneck for cpu performance. I'm hoping this translates a big a boost for players as it has for my machine.
Not much more to add outside of that. I'll keep on trucking, working on, and polishing, the feature to ensure first impressions are tippity top.
Cheers,
Greg
Comments (6)
I agree visual UI clutter can become annoying, besides you don't need to know how much money you have or what time it is at any time. Looks good though, but an option to turn it off would be nice., or maybe call it with a press of a button.
I’ve changed it so that it now only shows on opening the tool bag and whilst in shops. Works much better, appreciate the feedback.
Wow! The game is evolving so much!!! I can't wait for it to be finished! Honestly, what you're doing is incredible!!!
i think i would get more annoyed by the clock and balance ui part popping up every time a entity is highlightet. is it supposed to pop up all the time when you check any item? and that thing about the shader and the bottleneck. i belive, on my system (2x Xeon e5-2667v4) that might been a reason for the bad performance i got with my old cpu's. although i usually only had it around/inside the home
You’re right about it being too noisy and popping up a lot. I think what I’ll do is add a short delay to it turning off. This should calm it down. I’ll also add options to set UI to tab only, or always on. so players have options.
Motor goes vroooom