Hey all!

How are you all doing? I thought I would write a little bit about the delay between the supposibly already pushed update and the previous one - I thought I’d also take the time to talk a bit about the future of Checkmate and what there’s left to do.

Graphics updates thus far

Before things I’ll get into in more detail down below, I have been working on some new graphics. They’re not big details, but they do add a lot to the game. Here’s some screens of the new stuff:

There’s three new things to see here:

• Forests; Trees have now been replaced with forest tiles. Forest tiles are always 2x2, instead of the old 1x1 single tree. It still needs a bit of variety in models, but it’s already a major improvement.

• Grass: This one replaces the old flowers - The new grass adds well.. more grass and also has a lower poly version of the flowers, in order to compensate a bit in the performance for more objects in the world.

• Castle model: This one is also redone. It looks a lot better now, instead of the non-sense blocky looking thing it was previously.

The problem with the grass, at the moment, is that it costs a lot performance-wise, which doesn’t let me place a lot of them. I’ve been thinking about merging them into one model, but this causes issues with their wind animations. - I’ll have to find a solution for this, although I haven’t thought of one yet.

Reason for delay

Things have been a little messy on my end, so I haven’t been able to work on Checkmate a whole lot. Reasons for this include: having to move, starting with an internship for half a year and being lazy.

I also was always part of a modding community from which I quit, but I recently found fun again there, so that’s also been draining some time.

The good news is that I am motivated to work on Checkmate, I’m just more motivated to finish other things first before continuing development. - Everything should have settled again around 1st of August (perhaps I can sneak in some gamedev a little earlier), so that’s when I’ll be working on the game again “full-time”.

A look into the future

There’s a bunch of things wrong with Checkmate that need to be resolved, but most of those issues aren’t all that important, so I didn’t bother to fix them. One of them however, I’ve been slacking with and it needs to be changed: The render pipeline.

Currently the render pipeline is one big ol’ pile of broken and it’s chained together with many if-statements to get it working. It uses 14 different shaders to achieve effects which could easily be stacked in one shader and it uses over 12 screen-sized surfaces in the process (which takes up a lot of VRAM, which slows down the game - Also crashes on older computers, especially laptops).

This is one of the things I’ll be focussing on first. However, it will take some time to get it up and running, because it’s a very core part of the game and is very easy to break. There is no way out, except from starting fresh with the render pipeline.
Think of it as a surgery - It’ll take a bunch of time, because I have to very careful and may not be all done in one go, but it’ll solve a lot of issues you’ve been having afterwards.

Once that’s done, I’ll be working on fixing some more bugs I’ve had on my list and improve a couple of markers which aren’t very informative (especially the hunger & fatigue is badly communicated to the player). From there, I’ll just see what I need to address next - I’ll probably find bunches of issues in the process.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I’ve been up to a bunch of stuff of which none has been Checkmate, but I’ll be getting into the development as soon as I can.

Have a great day and catch y’all later!