Dinosaursssssss

[Dev Log] SHADOW of SOMETHING

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Alright I've now gotten into a weird state where SourceTree isn't showing any pending commits or file changes, and GitLab is showing that the project is still empty. This seems bad? Not sure what the solution here is, maybe best to just make a new repo, copy folders over and submit one at a time.

 

edit: alright yeah I'm trying this, wish me luck, hopefully this doesn't bone everything up

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4 hours ago, Dinosaursssssss said:

Actually, less of a joke idea, it'd be amazing if a bunch of people packaged up assets and a single scene from one of their old Wizard Jam games, and then one person stitched them together into a shooter. Fight across the island in Transmission: Lost, hop into a portal that drops you into a fight in Eyes of Cheating Hitman, teleport out and get chased down the street by the Dot Gobbler in  Mid Jam Power Move.

Hell yes, that would be an amazing game! If somebody decides to do this for next jam, I‘d send them a scene or two:)

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That reminds me, I should have made an asset sharing thread, really gotta be better about remembering that.

 

Update: I've been trying to upload this thing to git all night, but it's apparently now a ~20gb so this has become a serious ordeal. I think it's mostly the environment art (terrain and related plugins mostly) that's killing me...maybe I need to run a cat5 over here instead of using the wifi.

 

Animation.thumb.gif.fbe965239ca1414de5c734313b4396bf.gif

 

I've been reading Jason Schreier's book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels while waiting around. Each chapter is about the dev cycle for a different game, and It's amazing seeing the struggle it takes to release just about anything. He also gets some really astonishing, candid, interviews. Good stuff.

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image.png.53609da3f775483635ac889257711ca5.png

 

edit: after some meditation on this subject, I feel like I have basically 3 options.

1. Set up a Perforce server, either on a spare PC at home or on my webserver (though that'd require buying a higher tier plan)

2. Work without source control

3. Reduce the size of my repository

 

I think the right answer is probably 3 'cause 1 is probably too expensive and time consuming, and 2 scares me. I'll add some of these huge asset packs to my gitignore and only submit stuff I actually change.

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Alright, back to it. I started trying to build out the neutral town where you pick up missions and stuff. The scale of the buildings in this asset pack is a little off...this wood palette is about a meter tall, making this warehouse that looks like it has a couple floors about 3m total.

 

image.png.e8c5de7b699ac93a897dc0d16b297638.png

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I needed a guy with a gas mask, so I tried out Fuse for the first time, and exported him to Mixamo. Used Mixamo for animations before (all the characters in The Stake Out, my WJ...4? game were animated with it) but adding Fuse to the mix(amo) really brings it all together.

 

raiderdance.gif.2187cb120a0d170fd935fd6716dccc8b.gif

image.png.63025e991d6cfd67b22dba46f5c8614f.png

 

edit: 

 

ship it 

 

Ukz8Xa1.gif

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19 hours ago, Dinosaursssssss said:

image.png.53609da3f775483635ac889257711ca5.png

 

edit: after some meditation on this subject, I feel like I have basically 3 options.

1. Set up a Perforce server, either on a spare PC at home or on my webserver (though that'd require buying a higher tier plan)

2. Work without source control

3. Reduce the size of my repository

 

I think the right answer is probably 3 'cause 1 is probably too expensive and time consuming, and 2 scares me. I'll add some of these huge asset packs to my gitignore and only submit stuff I actually change.

 

Option 2. feels like the most authentic thing to do. Then again, I would love to actually see you complete this thing, so.. :gaming:

 

I hope you will eventually release a commentary mode for this game.

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making...progress??

 

IxFSfYG.gif

 

The first pass at this (in my last post) was me copying one of their premade characters, and swapping out the model/animations. This one I made using both their animator controller generator and their AI character creator. I think I set the mask and/or the avatar up wrong.

 

All the docs say about creating the model/textures/animations is:

"Your model must be fully modelled, rigged, and animated."

 

edit: on looking again, the animator got placed on a child object instead of the root when I used their tool, so it couldn't find any bones. I'm now pretty convinced this would have been faster to build myself.

 

Also I don't wanna seem like I'm totally dunking on this tool; making a system like this is an incredibly hard problem. But I have quite a bit of Unity experience and I'm really struggling to make this thing work! I feel like the issue is really the documentation being unclear about how things should be set up, with some fiddling I'm getting closer (I set all the animations to loop which helped, though he still slides around a lot).

 

double edit: I went through and copied the settings from all the animations the package came with, and now the slidiness is mostly gone and he seems to aim alright; the last big issue is that when he crouches he floats a bit. For some reason the animator controllers that came with the plugin are linked to crouch animations from a different plugin(???) so I'm not sure the settings are right.

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qOcY5o8.gif

 

Alright! ~an hour later, this is...acceptable. There's some wobble when he's aiming, and sometimes he randomly shoots at a 90 degree angle from you, but I'll take it. He doesn't crouch in this gif but that also works OK now; I had to set a Y offset in the crouch animation and turn on foot IK.

 

Between my git disasters and this, I've burned quite a bit of time; in total, I've written about 5 lines of code (to add optional tracers to guns).

 

I think the next thing I wanna tackle is a basic enemy spawning system. My plan is to place a bunch of spawn points and some large trigger volumes that'll act as regions. At runtime I'll group the triggers by volume, and spawn AI at the points when the player enters the region.

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Instead of doing what I said I made this lady who plays guitar in the neutral camp

 

4myVUpf.gif

 

Not sure what bone the guitar is meant to attach to...I tried both hands and neither was a great option. Spine maybe.

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Really enjoying this project from the outside. It's looking better than so many games out there already.

 

Can you make guitar lady play Totaka's song? Seems like a good idea.

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Here's some video from yesterday.

 

 

Other updates:

Spawning basically works, there're zones, when you enter them some number of enemies spawn.

 

There's a very basic quest system in; the guy at the shop (with the big clothing sign) will have infinite quests to go into town and retrieve an item for him. On returning with it you'll be rewarded with some bullets.

 

I talked with a few people about STALKER and they generally agreed that the simulation of the zone was it's most defining feature; the idea that you could get a quest, and by the time you got back, the quest giver was killed by other stalkers or a pack of dogs or whatever. I really liked the start of the faction balance ideas in Clear Sky so I'm going to attempt some more systemic faction stuff to get more in line with the values of the originals. I think NPCs with hunger/tiredness/trade routes/etc is probably out of scope, but I feel like I need to attempt something. I think the scope will be that factions can control areas of the map, and dynamically be able to take over other areas. Not sure what form that'll take yet; I guess whoever the last kill in that region comes from will own it.

 

I'd love to do a more needs-driven AI system, but I'd have to really dig into this Tactical AI plugin to make it happen and probably add some animations. If I have some time at the end of the week I'll look back into it.

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I added a rough pass at a faction simulation:

Each faction has a strength rating.

Every 4 hours (and at the start of the game) the SLife system spawns enemies until each faction has the same number as agents as their strength rating.

During this tick, we also take 50% of their agents and randomly give them a new behavior to either patrol (walk between their own factions outposts) or search (walk between friendly and enemy outposts).

Every time an agent dies, its faction loses .2 strength.

Every time a faction captures an outpost, they gain 5 strength. Outposts are captured by counting the number of agents nearby and assigning the outpost to the faction with the most agents nearby.

slife1.thumb.PNG.fafb7d34579290e262ae75bc9db4d423.PNGslife2.thumb.PNG.981db21abff6a34a019516d92a5aa378.PNG

 

This is a lot of fun to noodle with, but I think the best thing I could do right now is fix damage numbers and tweak things so the game is actually playable.

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As we close in on the final here, there're a couple things I wanted to do to add that might not make it:

 

Saving your equipment and the current faction status! And also add a new game/continue button up front to make that usable. Currently I'm trying to figure out some weird behaviors with UFPS's inventory system; it seems like if I pick up a gun, it doesn't add the ammo from that gun to my inventory, it adds a second gun with a full clip that I can't select. 

 

Along those lines, I also sorta wanted to make a Metro style bullet economy where the base pistol bullets are the standard currency and you can buy guns/bullets/whatever using them.

 

I'd also like to actually play a Digital Homicide game (or the glitch simulator thing) and see if there's any other polish I ought to add in (menus maybe). I actually can't find their games for sale any more though; Jim Sterling may have destroyed them?

 

I have about...a quarter of an anomaly system built that I'd like to wrap up; throwing bolts like in Stalker might actually be the most efficient solution. I wanted to do more of a geiger counter type device but I don't know if I'll have time (and I definitely don't have any art).

 

There's no ending, but that's probably fine.

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Alright I figured out the save/load issues and persisting weapons stuff; it's really strange to me that it isn't a feature that's included. When people were asking how to do it on the UFPS forums the developer was like, 'oh interesting use case, ill have to see if its possible' and never replied again. Very weird.

 

It was also actually a pain in the ass to implement; the code itself isn't bad, but the nomenclature in the plugin is sorta hard to follow. For example, a shotgun is an item that has an item bank of items of type shotgun shell. When I save, I have to record the contents of inventory.UnitBankInstances and inventory.InternalUnitBanks to get the weapon unit banks and ammo unit banks respectively. It makes sense in that it decouples weapons from ammunition, and lets you share ammo between types of weapons, but it was tough to dig through. In the end, for simplicity, I persist your ammo count but refill your current clip.

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Oh also I wasn't paying super duper close attention when I exported these animations, and I think I made the arms too long, which fucked up the auto rig a bit, resulting in this wacky wrist action:

 

Capture.PNG.65b7de89382bc90a3c4f350f2b3a1ed3.PNG

 

Probably not a big enough deal to bugfix. Also with the new way mixamo is set up I don't know if I could fix the rig anyway? I'd have to go back into Fuse, shorten the arms, re-export, and download/reimport everything. I think they changed the layout to reduce costs on themselves (I don't think you can save characters or custom fbxs you've uploaded anymore?) but it makes this kind of iterative work very time consuming.

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