Devlog 3: Getting the ball rolling

So, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last devlog. Last week, I spent time having a break from the project. However, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any updates this week!

Player in motion

As seen in the video above, you may have noticed that you can actually run around and do parkour now! The player physics uses a VirtualCharacter, equivalent to a CharacterBody3D in Godot. I had to set up gravity which was difficult as the built-in gravity from Jolt doesn’t work very well on non-simulated objects like the VirtualCharacter.

Lighting improvements

I removed baked lighting as it was increasing load time and didn’t look good combined with real-time. So I have switched to full real-time lighting. I added in cascading shadow maps (CSM) that is like LODs. This means that further away shadows have lower quality textures. (I tried to make it not noticeable though.)

Bug catching

Using Jolt in JavaScript means uses WebAssembly (WASM). WASM needs manual garbage collection for most objects you instantiate. I have patched all the possible memory leaks I could find in my physics code.

Mobile support

I have implemented the ability to actually control yourself and not run at 5 FPS on mobile. You can try it out, right now, at cookistudios.com/fps-os/.

P.S. I will be trying to write devlogs more often as development will be speeding up over time.