PostMortem : Reset your Path
As always : I need way more time to actually make something decent.
This game is barely playable on ' slow ' machines.
But ... I'm in these jams to stress/test my tools and extensions. Also I'm in
the League of Idiotic Stencylers! Doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done. What did go right? loading OBJ files with only ColorMaterial materialsIn the past I've used OBJ files with Textures, but I wanted to avoid texture loading.
I had to adjust the Away3D code to adjust for this. Since previously, only OBJ files that had textures worked.
Basically you have an .OBJ file with this
mtllib reset.mtl
You point to the textfile that has texture information in it. This file also needs to be on a web-based location!
o resetobject
If you have multiple OBJ files you need to be aware that this 'o' name is unique. Otherwise it will add all the OBJ files together.
(This took me a day of debugging)
usemtl color_name
This part is your material. Previously only texture references could be used.
What did go wrong? Performance issues drawing path in 3D : this was fine on 2D3D Tube drawing was a drain on the gameloop.
Drag&Drop game-mechanicThat mechanic worked nicely when it was 2D. But became unplayable on 3D.
I made it possible to single click on a path to edit it. But the direction changing code that was previously working fine made things way to responsive.
This leads to frustrating path creations that you did not intend.
I absolutely will re-visit this mechanism and hopefully also make a mobile/tablet movement capability
OBJ File loading on ItchIO : https://yourname.itch.io/yourgame/assets/data <- can't be used with HTTP Requests ! First I had the message 'Too much files in Zip' and after I used to include only 1x resources this message wend away.
The main problem was that the OBJParser that comes with Away3D is web-based. So you need your OBJ files to be on a network path.
Since you can't navigate from the host where your game is hosted : this means you can't load resources of a different website.
So I tried using ' visist URL ' block with the '
https://myname.itch.io/reset-your-path/assets/data '
That gives an error since apparently you cannot reference things on your own page
!!!! Scene Switching This became apparent on the last day !!!
And was the most frustrating thing to work on. Since that last day was reserved for assets.
I rather would have worked on the 3d Path optimization but the 'loading screen' / level selection / game screen
lead to ghost object creating and removing. Finally I had something working from the load-screen to the level-selection
and then to the game-screen. But switching from game to levelscene gave problems when arriving in another game-screen.
So I opted to restart the game when you want to go to the levelselection screen.
Post-Jam TODO * Away3D : scene switching & object loading
* Draw Mechanism allowing for keyboard and single click and drag&drop
* Tablet version