It’s still funny to see that the project title of my level editor is called ‘vg_leditor’, after Vanguard for which I was building it, while the way it is growing now it will be completely project-independent. It will certainly take significant time before I arrive at the point at which I can start tinkering on a clone of Lasagna to add project-specific content.

Still, Lasagna is looking more and more like an actual functional product. Already many features unavailable in GM are incorporated, such as zooming the room-view, setting the grid color and fixing the ratio between the grid-cell values. Other features, such as the layers are in development. A link to a full-sized screenshot can be found at the end of this post, showing a zoomed-in view with colored grid . The latter was done using blend mode to keep it visible with the tiles, but semi-transparent not to cover them entirely.

Showers are a wonderful place to be. Every morning the very first thing I do is take a shower. Perhaps it is the fact you are still half-asleep, tapping into the power of your sub-conscious, or the prowess of a fully-rested mind (well, most of the time), but I find that in these moments I can have brilliant ideas and the most lucent thoughts, be it about what needs to be done that day or, in this case, finding ideas/solutions for my latest GM project.

So last week I had two epiphanies: how to solve the interpolation issue with zooming while keeping interpolation available for text and yet another missing functionality I needed to add in Lasagna. The latter was the ability to move in negative space, i.e. going left an above the point (0,0) in the room. This is useful in many cases, for instance for adding wall objects at the rim of a level. I remember bumping into this issue many, many times in GM in the past. In the screenshot, you can see the start of this functionality by the arrowheads just visible in the top-left corner symbolising the origin of the room.

So I guess the moral of today’s blog: take a shower (don’t take it personally).