Adding Building Interior Items

This past month I've been busy with summer related tasks and I haven't had as much time to work on 3DWorld. Much of my 3DWorld development time was spent fixing bugs in preparation for, and as a result of, demos I made to various relatives who visited me.

The new features I've added for July are fire extinguishers, pizza boxes, and shirts. I'll describe each of these in the sections below, along with showing some screenshots.

Fire Extinguishers

Interactive objects are the most fun to add. I don't remember how I came up with the idea of adding fire extinguishers, but I'm glad I did. They were both relatively easy to add and serve a gameplay purpose. They can be found in two places: hanging on the walls on each floor in office building hallways, and inside some kitchen cabinets in houses. Fire extinguishers are placed as three separate objects in office buildings: The sign, the holder, and the extinguisher itself. The player can take the sign and extinguisher but not the holder.

Fire extinguishers can be sprayed for up to a few seconds until they're empty. Empty extinguishers serve no purpose, but they can still be picked up and put down on the floor or the top of another building object. (Now that I think of it, I should have them squish spiders and cockroaches like books.) Spraying them produces a stream of smoke-like particles affected by low gravity that spread out until they collide with a floor, wall, or other object. These particles have two effects. First, they cause nearby zombies to temporarily retreat, similar to hitting them with basketballs and soccer balls. Fire extinguishers are more effective at keeping zombies away, but they have a limited number of uses. I think they can be used about five times on a zombie before they're empty.

The second use is to put out fires that were started on rugs by sparks from broken basement lights. This isn't very helpful for the player at the moment since these fires will go out on their own after a few seconds. However, if I decide to add fire propagation and increased fire damage later, this could be an important gameplay mechanic.

Fire extinguishers are drawn as 3D models and oriented so that the spray nozzle is facing away from the player when being held. They're put down with the same orientation/rotation the player was most recently holding them in.

Fire extinguisher attached to a holder hanging on the wall of an office building hallway. Notice the sign pointing to it near the top of the image.

Fire extinguisher removed from the holder by the player an in the process of being sprayed.

Fire extinguisher placed on a table by the player.

Pizza Boxes

My mother came up with this idea, as well as the idea to add shirts. I found a pizza box lid texture and slapped it onto the top of a flat white cube to create a pizza box. Pizza boxes are procedurally placed on surface such as tables, desks, and counters. They start out closed. The player can use the action key to open and close the box.

When the box is open the pizza is visible and can be taken by the player. If the player's health is low, pizza is eaten with a special chewing sound and adds +50 health. Otherwise it goes into the player's inventory, and is added to both their accumulated money and carry weight. Pizza boxes are therefore the first food/non-drink consumable in the game. I plan to add more types of food in the future, and assign them different gameplay effects.

Closed pizza box, ready to be picked up or opened by the player.

Opened pizza box showing the jalapeno pepperoni pizza inside.

Shirts

I had already added a T-shirt image that was originally used for shirts hanging in closets. Then I replaced the shirts with 3D models, and the image went unused. Why waste an image that's already in the git repo (online version control system); let's reuse it for non-closet objects. Shirts now can be found in two places: on the floors of bedrooms, and in the larger sized dresser drawers. (I don't add them to smaller drawers because they're always spread out rather then being folded.)

Shirts don't have a gameplay use, they're simply low-value, low-weight collectable inventory items. I did have to put some extra effort into making spiders, rats, and cockroaches walk over shirts rather than around or through them. I also had to add a special case so that rolling soccer balls and basketballs don't collide with and get stuck on "floor shirts".

A T-shirt left on the bedroom floor by some lazy person.

The two top dresser drawers have been opened, showing the T-shirts inside. The player's reflection can be seen in the mirror.

Bonus Image

I'll end this post with a bug I found in the algorithm that places stairs to connect different floors of houses. Well, technically it may be more of a closet placement bug. In any case, the problem was that I never wrote the code to handle intersections between stairs and closets. Closets are technically room objects, but they have their own walls and doors and are therefore somewhat special to place in a building.

A closet with stairs going to an upper floor hidden inside it. Definitely not a bug in the stairs placement code!

This bug was quickly fixed. I'm not sure how long it has been around, but this is certainly the first time I've noticed it. I think it's because I recently added the ability for stairs placement to cut through walls of houses when connecting multiple floors with different floorplans. Ah, I don't think I've written a post on the new house floorplans yet. That will have to wait until next time.