Day 2 - Schedule inversion anomaly

13 hours late, because, excuses. Writing these devlogs is time-consuming.

Day 2 started out with me feeling quite productive, but looking back I can't find much I achieved. Largely I just copied some more marginally-useful code from Slumber.

That was before the accident happened.

After a chance trigger, I found myself reading the Godot shaders documentation and working on a feature that had been scheduled for day 6: a painterly effect with random colouration. I've never written a shader before (aside from some minor modifications to shadertoy ones), though OpenCL is basically the same thing. Shader programming is something I've been really looking forward to for years! It was fun.

But there were two massive time sinks: firstly was blindly writing and testing shader code to get the effects I wanted: random colouration and not-obviously-repeating tiling of an input texture. Secondly, creating a texture from a photo of an (actual Dalí) painting which had brushstrokes, was not too uneven, and tiled well. I never quite achieved any of those, despite endless experimenting. It's been a recurring lesson I've (not) learnt in my life, if you don't know how to do what you want, trial and error is a waste of time.

The effect so far could mostly have been achieved without a shader by blending some textures onto the map.

And there are seams due to an unfortunate shortcoming of 2D shaders and TileMaps in Godot which I've got to work around.

Here's another of the numerous textures I produced and threw away, with some more extreme shader parameters.

Well, that was the day gone in a bad way (and much of day 3 too). At least I was alone in wasting time.

The plan for tomorrow today is to implement the most basic elements of a RL. The player doesn't even have a (moving) sprite yet.