Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
No update today; it’s the Thanksgiving holiday weekend here in the States, and I’ve got holiday plans. I’ll get back to work next weekend polishing up the boss entrances and then probably building more dungeon rooms.
Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
After several weekends of being exhausted and sick, I’m finally feeling well and actually made some progress on this game today! I wasn’t happy with the work I’d done on Halloween for boss entrances, so I trashed it all and started over. There’s still a lot of work to do, but the basic concept is in place now. At first, the boss will appear as a large sculpture…
…but then it wakes up, revealing the entrance to the scary boss dungeon!
Video games are fun.
Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
Writing an early update today because I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to get any work done. My morning has been spent dealing with repeated GPU crashes. I’ve ordered a new GPU with same day shipping, but there’s a chance the problem is with the GPU connector port on the motherboard so I’m not certain that’ll fix the problem.
Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
No update today; I’m recovering from getting ill this week. If I feel better tomorrow, I’ll continue working on the never-ending task of Innsmouth dungeon rooms, or maybe tackle the boss entrance presentation I meant to do last weekend.
Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
Happy Halloween! Between festivities and some other real life demands on my time, I’m not sure how much I’ll get done on Eldritch 2 this weekend. I’m clearly not going to hit my goal of finishing Innsmouth dungeon rooms this month, unfortunately; but that is useful data for future scheduling. In the meantime, I decided to switch gears and work on the entrances to boss dungeons. And then I ran into an unusual bug.
While testing different configurations of boss entrances this morning, I noticed that sometimes adjacent rooms would disappear depending on the camera position and rotation. I assumed it was a sector/portal bug, but I haven’t touched portal code in years and I had never observed this bug before. So why was it happening now? I turned on some debugging tools to visualize the problem…
…And sure enough, there was something weird going on here. The portal on the right was correct, but the portal that should’ve been directly in front of my camera was out of place, and the portal to the room immediately to my left wasn’t visible at all from this view, leaving a window into empty space. My first theory was that this had something to do with the transformation of the room—it is mirrored and rotated from the way I built it in the editor—but that didn’t explain why I’d never seen this before, or why only one of the two adjacent portals in front of the camera was in the wrong place.
So I attached a debugger and dug in, repeatedly regenerating the world and slowly tracing back from where the portal gets created to where its position is calculated. And I eventually found the problem: when portal positions are set up, their global coordinates are rounded to the fixed grid size of their local generator. In the case of Eldritch 2, a dungeon (the local generator) is built on a 12m × 12m × 8m grid. But, the local generator can be in any position relative to global worldspace (i.e., the outdoor world). I call this the local offset.
It turned out this dungeon had a 6m local offset in the Y direction—exactly half of the grid size I was rounding to—and I wasn’t accounting for that offset when converting to global space. Which meant each portal’s position was right on the edge of being rounded either up or down, and small amounts of floating point imprecision in the stack of world and dungeon and room transforms could determine which way it would go. And that’s how one of two adjacent portals ended up in the wrong place: the first one just happened to get rounded down, and the second just happened to get rounded up.
It ended up being a trivial fix after I found the error. I just needed to subtract the dungeon’s local offset before rounding. But gosh it took me way too long to track this down. Anyway, now portals are stable, and this scene renders correctly.
