Things are afoot. As part of these things, we have had to do a few things that we have been putting off for awhile now here at Gaslamp HQ. One of these things is fixing pathing so people do not walk through each other; the other, which is what I have been working on, is a thorough shakedown of the building code.
As long-time readers are no doubt aware, one of our interesting pieces of technology is the code for procedural buildings. In Clockwork Empires, you designate a building footprint, feed it some style information (“brick walls and gabled roofs, please!”) and the engine churns out a building to your specification. There is significant Technical Devilry in our building code to do this, as it is a fairly hard problem to take somebody’s blueprint and get a building out of it.
As part of upcoming Things, one of the things we have been working on is a rewrite of our code for procedural buildings. The new code has a few key features that were requested by our art department:
1. It should not explode. (See this picture, arranged by David Baumgart and sent to me, of roofs exploding, set against a backdrop of early 2013 art.)
2. Support for other roof types. (Roofs come in a number of different styles, and we should not blow up when we handle them.)
3. Less fragility when handling cuts in buildings (for things like modules, doors, windows.)
4. “Good” edge beveling for roof flashing. What this means is that when a roof faces the player, and has complex geometry, we should bevel it appropriately.
5. A litany of other, minor artist complaints.
Accomplishing all of these things requires a certain amount of very tricky programming, and some very skilled debugging. How do you debug an exploding roof?
