Sunday, February 18th, 2018 —> -6˚C / +21˚F & snowing ‘lightly’ @ 8:15 am in Atlantic Canada —

– “Kaeren connecting Stone Lake with Keltic Vale” – Looks interesting, but it’s not for the weak of heart. –

— I’d say I spent about 8 hours working on various areas inside the 3D interactive ‘Role Playing’ game we’re building. But it was probably more like 12.

— One area, DelVahria, is especially complicated. Most of it is inside a cave. This needs 3 ‘Heightmaps’ { The visible terrain you can walk on and can’t walk through – usually. } One for the ground and the depths of the cave – a second for the ceiling of the cave { and this one has to be flipped upside down at creation – This is because all the terrain you see is one-dimensional +/or solid on one side, but invisible and you can walk through it without knowing it’s there from the other side. } – And the third bit of heightmap terrain covers the cave and in this case looks like a mountain from the outside. — You have to carefully line everything up or it looks really weird. And then you can’t do anything to any one of the ‘maps’ while they’re all together. – If you try to modify the floor of the cave and use the tool that pulls it down – you also end up pulling the ceiling down over the spot you’re ‘digging out’ and you pull a section of mountain over the cave down too. One little ‘oops’ can take half a second to ‘create’ and hours to undo – So you have to slide all the pieces apart, one at a time – carefully – and make sure you don’t loose one in the process – I send the mountain one way and the cave ceiling the other. Then you make your changes, fix your ‘oopses’ and take a breath, close your eyes and move everything back together.

— I tried to connect ‘DelVahria’ with another area yesterday – & had disastrous results – all three pieces went in three different directions. I thought the cave ceiling sailed off into oblivion and I would never find it again. But I crossed my fingers and went off in a straight line, lost sight of other two pieces, and whattaya know? – there it was – something like halfway to Cleveland – naked and totally confused. It took me about fifteen minutes to bring it back home and then another five minutes to get it lined up correctly.

— Today I tried half measures – ‘created’ a new area and called it ‘Keltic Vale’ – and left its real estate completely flat – and tried to connect that to DelVahria. I used some of my father’s favourite magic words when the two areas refused to line up completely – no matter how much I tried one map or the other was always at least one silly increment off. But okay – I left them a bit off like that – lined them up as close to perfectly as any two areas ever get, and then knitted them together with a tool whose icon is a band-aid. I tested the borders by having my active builder character run back and forth several times and the character did not fall through a crack in the world and fall screaming into oblivion.

— Then I tried to connect these two areas with three others that I knocked myself out on this week. Those three areas are connected east to west with ‘Stone Lake’ being the farthest west. I thought they would all play nice if I connected Keltic Vale to Stone Lake. { See ‘Kaeren’ at work ( above ) standing there while I ‘married’ the edges of both areas, and gave her credit for that. }

— But, connecting Stone Lake to Keltic Vale broke apart the three areas that had been securely fastened together. I didn’t have to go quite as far out into never never land to find all the pieces, but then the process of lining them up and ‘marrying’ their edges again, and then using the ‘band-aid’ tool to cement their bonds all over again took something like 5 hours. And I had to test all the glitches – have Kaeren run around and fall through cracks in the world again and hope she could recover from the trauma of falling into another dimension. I really like the builder characters that I do a lot of modifications to, & I go into mourning when one of them disappears forever. – Luckily, that didn’t happen. Kaeren must like me back.

– “Kaeren with night vision” – This is an un-doctored screen shot. – I usually have to mess with the exposure to get to the point where I can identify what I saw when I took the screenshot in the first place. – That’s ‘DelVahria’ in the distance behind her. –

— That’s DelVahria in the background. Kaeren looks frustrated here, doesn’t she? After hours of messing around with getting Stone Lake and both the other areas linked to Stone Lake back together, messing with borders that didn’t want to play nice, falling through a lot of cracks – And then going off on a wild and crazy hunt for a river that didn’t come back with Stone Lake { The ‘water’ just kind of hovered off in the distance, wondering if I’d notice it was missing – then took a lot of maneuvering and resizing to get it back in place. }

— So after hours of that kind of nonsense – The border between Keltic Vale and Stone Lake, which was fine five hours earlier – lost all its integrity and dropped her into the underworld no matter what we did – no matter how many times we used the ‘band-aid’ — I finally logged off and back on and had Kaeren run around a couple other areas for fun and then came back in to do some serious planetary healing and it worked.

— But then the link between Keltic Vale and DelVahria was even more messed up – trying to cross a simple no-nonsense straight-ahead border sent her teleporting off into mountains somewhere – and trying to get out of the mountains dropped her through the world again. More than once. So we logged out again, twiddled our thumbs for a while, logged back in and closed our eyes and ran across the border and – holy cow! It worked fine! Maybe this was a case of, “You used up all the memory I’m going to let you play with in this session, – kid.”

— AND – The sky went black at night – That hasn’t happened in a long time. I wondered why not and what I might have to do to get the night and the stars back – but there they were. Maybe the ‘world’ has to be up for a long period of time before the background routines allow for darkness and stars at night? Anything’s possible, I suppose –

– “Dark Skies over Stone Lake” – The lines around that area back there { which is what Stone Lake looked like from Keltic Vale before we got busy fixing things after we got the borders to work } – Define that area and tell us it is ‘selected’ while we’re working on it. –

— I was able to get the dark skies and stars to happen over at least one more area after checking out the settings in the ‘Environment’ Control/Editing panel.

– “Cave Entrance in Daylight” – With Kaeren about ready to cry and ask if she can’t just please go home and get some sleep. –

— At night the fog behind her is dark – in the daylight – those cave dwellers must have rigged themselves an ingenious method to get sunlight down inside their cave.

— So now, after twelve hours of working on this, I think I just spent another four cropping the screenshots and telling you all about what a long day of Game World Building is really like. Ya gotta love it –  or you’ll never stick to it long enough to get anything done at all.

— “Run Away Screaming-” “Aaaaaaaaaaa!”

~~~~~ Jim