Changelog #52 - Procedural Resource Visuals 2

July 11, 2022 · 3 min · Vsevolod

Typing this on my way to Kullens Fyr. A few days ago I decided to get a tighter grip on blog writing - I found it quite enjoyable as I realized that I actually have a lot of things to write about. I made two blog posts related to Colossal Citadels - one about its fog implementation, and the other about triangle grid, which is another unique thing about this game. Both blog posts got some attention and I’m happy with them.

But still, being in not a good mood, I’ve done not so much for Colossal Citadels; however, I’ve implemented a very important feature that actually needed a lot of internal work. Procedural resources, which you mine in the world (trees, stones, metals, etc) will have a visual effect on everything you craft and build: from yesterday on, weapons now have colors/textures/animations/vfx taken from ores, which I recently improved a lot. Procedural trees, stones, as well as procedural visuals for buildings and armor are on the way!

From other less important things, I’ve finally moved to C++20 - oh it’s so good! I couldn’t use ranges-v3 (the prototype of std::ranges feature from C++20, but supported in C++17), because of conflicts with Unreal Engine. But lately, someone pointed me out that the engine actually was already fixed to support the latest C++ and I can just try it (it didn’t work last time I tried). Now it does! So I’m enjoying nice cool things from the new standard now such as ranges, concepts and finally starts_with, haha! Also, I’m moving back to my favorite text editor, because Rider is paid now and still incredibly buggy - I used it because of fancy IntelliJ inspection tools, and Visual Studio is not in my taste (I hate it). There were a lot of issues with getting VS Code to work, but so far I managed to fix all of them and now having a pleasure to work in it.

Here is the full changelog:

  • improved tooltips
    • removed darkening of screen on tooltip lock
    • improved tooltip lock behaviour
    • equipment tooltips now display durability and wear in a separate place, instead of enlarging list of effects
    • efficiency bonuses on resources are now implicit, reflecting only in output resource stats
  • improved some texts
  • fixed inconvenient tile highlighting of line spells; they now display only affected tiles and not range
  • new, simpler distance function for zones (like, action range). It is the third one from the latest blog.
  • moved to C++20
  • when you produce weaponry, now their colors and vfx is transferred from the ores from which you mined the metal. Also, color is taken from wood (but they’re not procedural yet)
  • optimized the fog on CPU and GPU a little bit
  • improved this website’s design
  • bugfixes
  • new bugs

Typing this on my way from Kullens Fyr. Oh my gosh, this was so good! These huge rocks and splashing waves! For Nth time I’m in here Sweden thinking “oh wow, now THIS is the most beautiful place I’ve been to!”