So I wanted to bite off something a little easier and a little less intense before really jumping into combat (which I’ve actually decided I don’t think is next after all).

The health bars sucked and left a lot to be desired. I wasn’t happy with the code, and I wasn’t happy with how wierdly off-center they became on the sides of the screen.

These sprites were what we call “billboarded”, meaning that the sprites weren’t affected by 3d spatial distortion or FoV. The healthbars (and the selection icon) were also billboarded so that they were always legible.

The problem is that, as things get closer to the edge of the screen, they get slightly distorted due to our perception of 3d space. This was making the healthbars and selection icons no longer line up with the characters.

And thus began a grueling two-day long journey into spatial programming, lensing, linear algebra, and intense complex problem-solving.

Which I threw away entirely in the end, turned off the sprite-level billboarding, wrote my own custom billboarding script (which was about three lines of code), and billboarded the whole thing together as a unit so that it always appeared perfectly in-line.

So now, we have nameplates!

The selection icon is still a UI element, which means it is doing some mathematics to figure out where it’s supposed to be… but that’s okay. For now.

Next I think I’m going to implement game states, so the server can be the authority on starting dialogues, receiving items, updating progression flags, etc.

I want to do that before combat since combat will be a game state that the server will need to be the authority on.

Enjoy a gif!