Blink blink

Don't you blink, you might miss it.

Long time, no post. Sad to not have worked on Ponyland much at all. Was either busy with other things or just tired. But hey, I got the pony to blink! Now her eyes can be properly moisturized.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see what things that belong on the ground, like ponds and pathways, would look like. Out of laziness, I made a very crude pond drawing with my laptop trackpad and reused the crafting interface's "Craft!" button as a "wooden walkway." Viola!

Hopefully that perspective stuff doesn't look too weird.

A lot of bugs squashed in parallax mode.

Good news! Almost everything is back to normal in 2.5D mode! I got fruits to bounce, all the fruit trees are functioning, all the flowering shrubs are working, background transparencies are working, and so on. A lot of things I had broken before seem to be working just fine.

The movement marker is kind of working too. It's just being a little weird because it's rotated onto the floor and I can't un-rotate it, but it's not the biggest issue right now.  So I just need to fix that. And I need to figure out what to do with items like clover patches where part of it belongs to the ground and part of it acts like normal objects.

Chaos

First things first, I got a menu to pop up when you click on an item and the ribbons animate when you hover over them. Haven't done anything to make the selected ribbon more noticeable yet.

And then... chaos. You see, a friend had recently played Don't Starve over the weekend, and I was very interested in how the game's camera works. It's like 2.5D. It has a parallax effect. In all my previous versions, Ponyland is stationary; nothing moves because it's all done with an orthographic camera. I really wanted to try this parallax effect and... everything is a mess now!

The pony has been sentenced to the warped dimension:

Good-bye, cruel world...

So, what has to be done in order to achieve a 2D parallax effect is to change the camera from orthographic to perspective. But alas... this creates a lot of problems. Things are no longer just 2D. Life is no longer simple. They must now be 3D. My sprites and artwork are fine, but all the components and tricks I used to sort and order my sprites had to be changed or modified. Now instead of using 2D colliders for things like clicking on interactive objects and sprite transparencies, I must use 3D colliders. Every asset needs to be updated. That's not all though, now my raycasts need to be converted and done in a different way.

My fancy golden crosshair marker is being wonky. My dropped fruits are now stuck halfway through the ground... I need to figure that one out. Oh, and the way the parallax is done is by rotating all the sprites 45 degrees, and the camera 45 degrees as well. It's very strange to work with the 3D colliders when everything is rotated 45 degrees. It's not a thing I can eyeball, I need to test out the position of every collider in order to make sure it's working well. See Stella's cottage with 3D colliders:

I've made a branch in my version control for this parallax effect stuff, so nothing is horribly mutated from my last post to the point where I can't get it back. This 2.5D/3D work would open the door to a lot of cool things. Like... uh... this ball:

And then I made it into an eyeball. Get it?! Ahahahahaha.

But seriously, I would be able to use all three axes now. In 2D mode, I used only X and Y. In 2.5D mode, I use X as my X, but Z as my "Y" which is a little strange, but now my Y can actually be used for things like height. Woah, I wonder if I can have clouds and floating platforms? The possibilities... I haven't thought of all of them yet. But I'd be able to have towers and bridges and other cool things! Gravity actually works now too. The pony can fall off colliders.

Here's a final shot of the parallax effect.