Day 186: Shadows

Hello friends,

Today I tackled a visual issue, shadows, they shouldn't show if there isn't a tile to project on, let's fix that.

What I'm Not Doing

Let me be clear. I'm creating my shadows as a simple circle shape that follows the connected object. It's not an accurate representation of the shape of the object, and it is not connected or created to a light source. I don't think this simple game should be more in depth than that. So that being said, the shadow will have two states, showing the full circle, or not.

What I Am Doing

There's three main cases I want to account for.

1. Showing the shadow when the player is above a tile.
2. Not showing it when the underneath tile is empty.
3. Not showing it when the player is under the tiles.

I started by creating a function that tracks the state of the tiles at any given X, Z position. Be warned I did vibe code this part a bit.

bool Collision::TileUnder(const sf::Vector3f& obj, const std::vector<CubeTile*>& tiles)
{
    // Set a bit of leeway when calculating the distance to a tile
    const float tolerance = 0.5f;

    // Case 3: obj under ground level
    if (obj.y < 0)
        return false;

    for (auto* t : tiles)
    {
        // Skip empty tiles
        if (!t->m_tileId)
            continue;

        // Calc dist to grid position
        float dx = obj.x - t->m_gridCoords.x;
        float dz = obj.z - t->m_gridCoords.z;

        // Is obj above a tile?
        bool horizontallyAbove = (std::abs(dx) < tolerance && std::abs(dz) < tolerance);

        if (horizontallyAbove)
            return true;
    }

    return false;
}

Great, now I can detect the obj in relation to the tiles. I did a couple other things like add this bool check in player and item's Draw function:

if (showShadow)
    window.draw(player);

Then in my main file I just use the collision function which controls this showShadow variable. That's it, now the shadow doesn't show up weirdly. I mean kinda. There's a few bugs related to how depth is being calculated, this is also affecting how player gets drawn but at this point it's not ruining my immersion enough to fix it.

Thanks for reading today's blog. I just had a look and I've been working on this game for 36 days now. Damn, that's too long. It's been a good learning experience but I think I could benefit from getting these out quicker. But on the other hand, I don't wanna rush things. Either way, it is what it is, I won't be slow forever, hopefully aha. Until next time dear readers.