Loading Characters in the Client

So, as the observant may be aware I was gone for a week. I had a feeling that might happen. Let's just say I was indisposed and leave it at that, don't need anyone worrying or feeling sorry for me. I'm back to work now.

So the first thing I need to do today is remember exactly where I was Friday the week previous. Best way I can think to do that is open up Godot and look at my client and apartment server, with the last post I made here as a reference. That's kinda the point of the dev log, after all...

Alright, looks like I finished loading the character data to the server and character creation was handled.

What I think I will do before I continue on to load the data from the server to the client is... I will set up some redundancy in my db backups. I want to have a daily backup made to an external source so if I manage to break the DB or if my hardware or software should fail I got something to fall back on. I was only doing weekly backups.

I started out with the idea I would write a Dockerfile, then eventually came to the conclusion that I should just create a PostgreSQL container and add cron. Now it'll run a pg_dumpall every day at midnight on a remote server with a simple timestamp.sql file generated in a folder called dbbackups.

There, now with that out of the way I can focus on loading Characters to the Client.

Of course, now I have to really consider my sprite base and probably spend some time working on it before I go much further with character data. Since I only did the bare minimum for testing there's only one hair and face frame each, of course... that is because I don't plan to use this base.

So, now it's lunch time. After which I will shower and then I will probably have some ideas about my sprite base. I also want to load the stats into categorical dictionaries so I can more easily operate on them. I should also maybe make a character window to show them.

I want my sprite base to be similar to Endless Online or Suikoden, something tall that I can add a bit of detail to but not some chibified crap. Never liked the bobble-headed characters in most games.

I could go with 8-direction sprites which would take a lot of work long-term but have a more polished feel... or I could use the EO formula and see how that goes with sprite flipping instead of drawing all the sprite directions individually. I could also cut out 4 of the directions and only use the diagonal sprites which would look a little weird sometimes but ultimately it comes down to how much I want to draw for each hair, equipment piece, face, etc.

Considering we'll have to draw all the geru and their animations, all the tiles, all the furniture and everything else... I don't know if it would be wise to have too much going on in the player sprite. I might feel gung-ho about having a bunch of frames right now but somewhere down the line it may get tiring.

I suppose I could just implement the EO Sprite for now, it is an abandoned project now. If I decide I want to use it I can try and find a way to get permission or change it enough that it's not an issue down the line. That will give me some idea what things will look like with tall sprites at least. It would require me to rework how the animation controller and character control works...

If I am honest right now I seem to be in a depressive state. I am a bit worried about my cat who has had a lot of trouble lately and my own potential for ending up indisposed for another week or more. I am trying to distract myself by working on this, however I feel I might make some large mistakes here because of my current state of mind. I need to have meaningful progress however so I will soldier on and hope I manage to pull it together with limited poor decisions.

Yeah, fuck it. Let's just use EO sprites for now. It's the closest thing to what I have in my head. Que sera, sera. Carpe diem and all that.

It is after all what inspired me to start this whole damn adventure. Why not pay homage by directly ripping off a part of it? I imagine I will be making a lot of modifications to it, but for now I have a base to work with.

With that I will now have to do the female version and implement them into the animation controller.

Of course I need 3 skin color palette edits for each... and faces and hairs. But I have already tested all that and know it's fine, so I can handle adding that once I have the thing walking around and know it's not going to look busted.

I do have some interesting issues with the animation player, I will have to investigate further but I do prefer this much more. Way less frames as well.

The issue was simple, I had the old animation controller trying to hijack control from new one, once I disabled the old one for the short characters this one began to work fine.

I still have to deal with skin colors, hair and faces, though. I also noticed a few busted frames I will need to fix as well. Gonna get on fixing them frames before I make any decisions on what to do next.

Alright, cleaned up the frames. Hopefully wont need to do any more edits.

I think the next thing I should do if I was a wise man would be make the skin color changes and add some faces and hair. I could also lift a couple hair styles from EO and plop them in here to give me something as a placeholder and have a template to work on that as well... Hmm...

I'll make some tea and have a think, I need to stretch my legs.

Eh fuck it, gonna scoop some two-tree hairstyles while I am at it. I just need something there and I don't really have time to be drawing it all after losing last week. I was really aiming to have SOMETHING to show by Xmas...

Anyway, after a bit of res hacking and whatnot... I got a few hairstyles. I'll likely need to grab a few more for more feminine styles but for now I will just add some faces.

I do like drawing my own pixel art, really.

Heh, forgot I made my namesake a female.

I'll probably need to do some correcting for placements on male/female in code but it's fine for the moment... I think. Though I am damn sure I just broke my character creation.

While fixing that I found a bug I would not have seen without having done this. I wasn't changing the body type to update the sprite whenever gender was selected.

Well, with that I think I have basic character creation and loading.

I guess the next part is apartments. (Oh boy)

It's 4:11 now so all I can really do is plan for tomorrow. I think the very first thing I need to do is create the basic starter apartment. I'll have to work out how the furniture is placed, create a couple bits of basic furniture and place them, get them saving and loading, sending the whole thing over to the client...

Well, I redesigned the character and ripped off a bunch of Endless Online Sprites, I also got characters loading from the server. Not bad for my first day back, could be better but I'll take it.

I've got a general idea what I am going to be doing the rest of the week and hope to finish the basic apartment stuff by Friday so Monday I can start on Tanks (which are just tiny apartments) and finally the Geru Server and moving all the care logic and Timer-chan over to it.

Once I have the Geru server implemented and everything all friendly and nice I think it will be time to test... though I am not sure who I will have to test it but I'll figure it out.

I'm gonna go make my commits and clock out.