Moving every year is my Nemesis

When relocating to a new assignment from my main job (yet again) we ran into some issues which delayed getting back into finishing this project. It should have been rather quick to ship
our stuff to Prince of Wales Island but it took 2 months. In addition, they had lost approximately 20 boxes that still have not been recovered.
Well, I finally came to the conclusion that what is lost is lost and rebought monitors, keyboards, speakers, cords, mice, etc. I am thankful that the main computer was not lost because it is a pain getting all of the programs reinstalled so that work can continue.
However, it has been nice to get a break. I had a great time playing Unturned. This helped me understand that fun is above all else in game design. I was even able to use an old laptop that I luckily kept and really focused on what makes the game so addicting at times.
Games are supposed to provide an escape, and that is hopefully something that I can ultimately provide.
And now to the progress! I needed something to get me back into development with programming behavior and model design at the same time. This reminded me of something that had been bothering me for a while on the short play testing rounds -- the Shal Shar trees!
I am now finally pleased with the megaflora in Gods and Nemesis. The world keeps opening up and becoming its own. Most games I played have a simple system of breaking down a tree for firewood or building material. This was how my game was but you could only harvest saplings. This had
always bothered me but it was a decision that was necessary to limit computations at the time. Also, I wanted to use the built-in systems that most game engines have and paint the tree objects. Outside of being just fun to use, the terrain painting system also provided wind movement with built-in levels-of-detail (LOD) to reduce draw calls -- very important as you can imagine. This came at the heavy cost of making these painted objects non-interactive. And when I say non-interactive, I mean non-interactive as even collision meshes didn't work right. A player could not climb these trees without noticing that the collision did not match the object for instance.
It took a lot of planning and theory to figure out how to solve these issues (well for me anyway).
The main drawback is that I have excepted the fate of manually placing every plant and tree in the world which will be especially time-consuming when re-creating the mimic-living forest.
In the long run, it is worth it.
Shal Shar trees are very unique in that they often have multiple trunks and so their breakdown should be unique as well. The complexity is where a player targets when taking down a Shal Shar tree. Most of the time you can only take out the base trunks but there can be situations where the player will be able to take out the middle portion or attack the branches first using magic or projectiles. This was very complex because the physics changed accordingly.
On top of it all, I was also shocked when I went to create rustling leaf sounds that nothing I had prerecorded years ago was useable. I could have sworn that I covered all of the basics. So I had to go out into the wild against my natural hermit mentality and get a sound byte! It just happened to be the day our yard was trimmed so there were plenty of branches with fresh leaves to get what I needed.
--- Rant: Developers might be interested in this fix ?---
However, once I recorded everything I was perplexed by the hum in the background of the soundbites. You would think I was on a starship -- it was that bad. It turns out this noise was there all along and not feedback. It is amazing how the mind works. It appears our minds blocked this out because it was later found to be the hum of a nearby factory generator. Regardless, I was able to isolate this and take it out but then it left a tinny result with a deficit to the left side recording (still not sure why). All in all, I was able to fix this by creating a mono-sound version of the isolated portion and offsetting it to fill in the left speaker. I then made yet another copy which I changed the pitch and added a g-verb effect to fill it in. The results are so nice and I learned a lot thanks to the powers behind Audacity!
-- End of Rant ------------------

The trees now respond with proper sound effects depending on how they are chopped down! If you attack the pillar trunk supports you get the crackling release. If you start at the middle it will have more leaf rustling. And of course, there is an amazing opportunity to expand what you can get when harvesting the trees. You can collect old leaves to burst the temperature to get campfires started or use some of the fresh leaves for alchemy. Today I will get the leaves to have a more natural look when being picked up probably by using restrained cloth physics.
Now it is time to finish up this side of the project by taking care of the other versions of the Shal Shar trees and making a similar system for the very rare Morprif trees! This side detour made for a nice welcome back into this passion project. With the short break and great success with the trees, I will be able to go back and finish up the loose ends to the storyline system and expand it for easier future modding. I hope to include all of the cool features that Steam has produced over the years which probably would never have been in the cards using the old engine.
Also, I almost forgot! I have a helping hand with the aspects of communicating the progress, ETA, and updates. I am happy to welcome PixieStitch to the folds of this great Nemesis of a project. She is a project setter and sound-byte-getter! This is very much needed because I love developing but suck at communicating what is going on every day.
Anyways thank you for taking the time to read this and as always I am open to suggestions -- it keeps the Nemesis ever-growing.

Take Care,

Chadwee