(Starting on) Devices and Base management

Started on work on the base management portion of the game. There is a lot to do and I decided to start on the equivalent of the Prison area first. Where you can find captured enemies and play with them at your leisure. To make it more fun, that means devices!

The basic functionality is working already, as in you can hop on to a device and animations will play. This post will be public so you'll have to use your imagination on what that looks like. 

However, complementary features, such as adding a "Carry" option to drag units around during grabs is still to-do. Those features are what I am currently working on.

I also implemented the render-to-texture feature, which is shown below to render portraits to texture:

This rendering portrait feature is something that HR had but is missing in HRT. This new system is superior to the implementation in HR because rendering to texture and reuse is a lot more efficient than re-rendering the portrait every frame. In fact, HR runs alot better when I disable the rendering portrait feature when testing on low powered hardware.

Besides the obvious applications of these portrait textures, another area I want to improve is the character customization. In short, I am aiming for something like this:

Here is where the rendering-to-texture will come into play. The outfits pieces can be selectively rendered to a texture and to use as preview. Rendering-to-texture in game is generally superior to prepared texture files because it will use the same lighting system, so it gives more consistent results on how it will look like in game, but also to benefit from whatever upgrades in the in-game lighting system gets.

Character customization is still very early in development but I hope this will give you a taste of what it will be like.