Family Time Obligation: Complete, back to work :)

Spent the last day and a bit with the family - keeping myself social. Unfortunately this means work was light on the project until today :).

What has been done?

• Moved map/grid initialization from code generation to image based generation (improving start up speed from 5-10s, down to <1s.
  • This also opens up the ability for me to quickly throw levels together for the campaign, and potentially allow players to make their own maps in future to save + share with other players.
• Improved FPS drop issues by moving chunk updates back to the main thread, also moved lights into an object pool (to prevent instancing FPS drops).
• Added logic for lighting distance - will not spawn lighting if another light is within 4 tiles.
• Added corner Wall Reinforcing checks - will reinforce the corner tile should it have 1 or more ground tile, and 2 or more reinforce wall tiles as neighbours (8 directional).
• Added Impenetrable Walls to map, to prevent mining out of the map.
• Added Mineral Wall Tiles and Mineral Ground Tiles.
• Adjusted the Fog of War to work closer to DK1: Minerals/Resources and Impenetrable Walls are shown through the fog of war.
• Added new feature to shader: blur, which uses specific UV overreach to blur the edges of the texture further - this softens the fog of war a bit more to closer match the desired style.
• Properly exhibit the Fog of War walker's ability to "break into cavities" (seen in the video, when breaking a wall into a cavity, it is all displayed through the fog of war).

Shown at the start of the video is the new "from_image" function, this turns the below image into the game map, and does so way faster than the method I was using to generate map with noise/etc. Also allowed me to hand craft specific existing resources/dungeons on the maps :).

Map Image (Hue adjusted to be readable, and sized up 4x - the original image is 80x80)

A top down view of the map generated from the image to the left.