Extra Improvements Aquired

Another 2 weeks have passed and yes for this time I ran out of "Creative Ideas" for Title names. Sry, I try to deliver something more cringy next time.

Enough with the bad jokes and time for actual progress updates.

Update on Testing:

Since the last post Testing's, I have been working on my engines flaws a lot to improve them.
It's not fully done yet but rendering itself got so much more improved, bugs were fixed, unnecessary checks were removed.
The Improvement were massive and there is still so much to do that I am happy at least that there is at least stuff left to improve, that's why its not fully done yet,
because these things go into pretty advanced topics which if I do them wrong the loss of performance can also happen. So yeah.

Since the improvements on mains laptop were done other areas were showing issues now because of the increased size of batches.
They grew so dramatically that they now show issues on the validation if they should be rendered or not.

Outside of that the bugs that were posted in the previous post were finally fixed now too.
When the camera rotates the Height Controller freezes now so not some issues can show up, the rendering of the trees have no longer a render sorting issue and the UI overall got a improvement (later on that).

So overall the early beginning of the first week was pretty successful in most parts.

The new UI Features:

One of Mains idea was to allow the User to decide the "MainColors" of a Window.
Which was defaulting to a light blue, but that was if you had a lot of windows and most of them Minimized very confusing which one was which.
So his suggestion was: Allow to customize the colors of the main color. Via a fixed pool or something.

And yes he was right with his critic/suggestion. So I decided yes that's a good idea and I kinda want to do a color picker anyway. So why not do it this week as a fun little project to keep my motivation/productivity high.

So first of all, I had no idea how to do that so my first thought was, how did other do it.
Thinmatrix had made one, mods like JourneyMap had one too.
So I wanted to see their attempts since it looked like a cool rendering challenge.
Sadly I was disappointed quite quickly. It was just a texture, no magic ticks whatsoever. 

Since I didn't want to steal resources from them first thing was googling for free or cheap color-wheels. There were some, but either not the format/quality I wanted or their license was so bad that I was like, "Even if it is a don't be a dick license this is not carry-able so lets make my own".

To make it quick I made a vector renderer of Color Wheel that generates the color based on the angle it is from the center, After fixing some bugs that I  found it was pretty good and quick too to generate. (8k Versions looked nice xD)

So I made myself a 128x128 version implemented it and started design the window.
Sadly really early versions had no screenshots. It looked awful in the design that's all I can say.
But here is 2 of the steps I went though.

Adding new Sliders for the colors, making some test placements to see if they were good.
But stuff was still missing.

Re-adjusting the Color Preview, Adding a Text to Color converter, and the buttons, and some other features like a "Typo which nobody mentioned by the way I showed them xDDD"
(Yeah I just noticed that by the time of writing)

But yeah a Color Memory with lock function, etc.
And the final design was shown on the start. It was done.

But actually not. There were still some issues, like: How do I recolor the window?
Yeah I needed to add a new set of Buttons just for the color wheel, also this should have priority over everything.
So popups were required. But bugs were there so now you could bypass them.
Also text would take priority over everything so a "Focus Lost" mechanic was now required too. The list was never going to end and the stress part started coming. But luckily after 1 day of going through everything slowly solved these issues.

So in the end of the day. I have now Popus, while I was at it I fixed a bunch of bugs that the UI was plagued with, cleaning up also code and my coloring allows me now to recolor all the Windows individually.
They even save their colors based on which screen their used in.
So overall a good addition work.

Functional Steps done:

So since all that happened I kinda wanted something in regards of GamePlay even if it was only superficial to give me at least something "Hey not only engine progress happens", because it feels like I am stuck in there and never come out. Call it self padding.

So I decided to add a bit of function to the Forester.

As you can see the Forester now cuts down trees in the nearby area. It's not much but it shows some stuff happening. (Also fixing bugs with rendering visuals)

Extra to that I tried adding something new too. These Yellow/Brownish things are wheat fields and are totally inspired by Kingdom and Castles. I like the look but this is just a prototype to test some outside software out that sadly does not work how I like it but I found at least a replacement. (I need simple tools because art stuff is to slow with me)

But yeah even the small things count and I needed now a different small thing.

Other Projects:

As most of you know I am also a MC modder and if you follow minecraft it started updating to 1.14.2-1.14.3 (maybe 4-5 will also come out too)
But the new version is out and I soon have to do updates to the important mods too.
Though that's obvious, these projects take a lot of work to be ported and adjusted to the latest changes. So the next 2 posts will be more sparse on the game engine stuff because a lot of my priority goes very soon to porting these things. 

After that Game project gets again full priority.

Anyway thanks for reading, thanks for the support and thank main for the testing!

Speiger