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First steps in Delve

· 1 min read

Contents
  1. Input that isn't tied to a keyboard
  2. How heavy is a crowd of sprites?

Until this week, Prometheus was something you looked at. Now you can walk around in it.

Delve is the engine's first walking mode. A third-person camera tilted at 35° follows a sprite character, and every billboard in the scene turns to face the camera, picking the right direction and animation frame as it moves. It runs inside the editor, so I can step into a scene I'm building, walk around it, and step back out to carry on editing.

Input that isn't tied to a keyboard

Delve brought the input system with it. Game code never asks "is W pressed?". It asks for actions like move and turn, and whatever the player is holding supplies them. On a keyboard that's the usual keys. On a touchscreen a virtual stick appears bottom-left, with turn buttons on the right:

Delve with touch controls: a virtual stick bottom-left, turn and exit buttons bottom-right
Delve with touch controls: a virtual stick bottom-left, turn and exit buttons bottom-right

Hide the editor around it and what's left is what a player would see:

The same character with the editor hidden: the player's view
The same character with the editor hidden: the player's view

How heavy is a crowd of sprites?

Every billboard has to be turned, framed and positioned every frame, so I measured that early. Fifty animated billboards held a mean of 12.7 ms per frame on my desktop while I walked around them, about 79 frames a second. That's a development machine, not a phone, so it's a baseline to measure later work against rather than a verdict.