Car buying and spawning

7 October, 2024

Sorry for the delay in updates! I've been very busy with work but I'm still taking plenty of time to work on Broadview.

For several weeks I've been working on a bunch of internal systems, but I've went ahead and knocked out a critical feature: buying and spawning cars. This probably doesn't deserve a post on its own, but I figure what the heck, it's been a while since I've done one. Keep in mind, the UI is not quite finished yet. Here's a video:

There's a couple of cool things about this:

The car preview in the shop is actually a real entity simulated by the world, as opposed to V1 where it was just a fake model. I demonstrated this by having it start when you select it and turning on the blinkers.

I'm experimenting with a "focus" (or maybe you could call it "cutscene"?) system that can dynamically decide what entities to move your camera to based on what you're doing. In this case, when you spawn a car, it'll move the camera to the car you just spawned so you know where it is. Players might not like this, so I might implement a way to skip it.

The data in the car spawner modal is live: we can display any state we want there for spawned vehicles, such as its health, fuel, occupants, etc. This is a big improvement over V1 where it wasn't able to show any of that data, and it's a testament to the power of the UI being able to directly access the game world and automatically update. This is a pretty basic example of such, but future features will make use of this heavily.

That's all for now. More coming soon!