Day 3-
This was a big step forward.
I've completed another Tile Sheet, this time of the forest. I've included pavement, dirt, water, greenery, items, and some intense, ominous "red tiles." Since most of it consists of relevant, single hand selected tiles I've decided to make a second tile sheet with drawn in objects like trees and such. This will make it easier for me to just drag and drop fully made objects to copy all over the place. Forests have a lot of trees apparently. Who knew?
Top and bottom portions of the first Forest Tile Set.
A lot of research went into character movement and tilemap layers. I'm very happy with the current setup for how the camera follows the player. It unfortunately took and hour or so to figure out why I wasn't seeing the little guy at first. (hint: pay attention to the Z axis. It needs to be a lower number than the things you wish to see) AI imported the giant hi-res Google Map reference image and inserted as the very bottom layer then added some tilemap layers on top with varying layer numbers. I've scaled it to be almost identical to the geographic dimensions of the real life trail, however to compensate for the ridiculous amount of time it would take to walk it (like you would in reality) I made the walk speed a bit faster than the normal human and added a run option when holding down the Shift Key. This will also have a practical use when avoiding... stuff...
I tried Gyazo for recording Gif screens and it was rendering insane glitchy image artifacts, so I uninstalled it and downloaded ShareX instead. A world of difference! So much easier. The capture Hotkeys had to be changed as the defaults overlap with other ones. It won't replace Snip It for screencaps but the Gif component is awesome!
Currently there are 4 layers. The base to walk on, a second to collide with, and two more varying foreground forestry ones. Took me longer than I'm willing to admit to realize I needed to switch from 2D to 3D camera view and set the camera projection to "perspective" not "orthographic." I'm super impressed with how it's working out!
Forestry!
I think I'm on track. There seems to be a lot of grunt work ahead this week with drawing in the entirety of the map. Then comes implementing some... behaviors.
-Randall