Hello, there! We have been working away despite our silence. Here's what we've been up to for the last two months:
NEW ITEMS
(New Gladiator Helm & Spatha sword, a set ready for arena battles!)
(Sporting the new helm & sword, or well… two)
MORE FLOWERS
(April showers bring May flowers. Worked better in May…)
CASTLE PROGRESS
The main improvement, besides battlements upon the outer walls, is the addition of splatmaps!
NEW BUILDINGS
(Farmhouse, peasants need a place to sleep.)
(Inside the farmhouse. Dirt floors included.)
(And the complementary Outhouse.)
HARBOR PIER IMPROVEMENTS
(Supports have been added along the sides.)
CHARACTER MOTOR PROGRESS
Jon has continued to toil away on the revised character motor. Some spoils:
- Tree Climbing/Swimming – functioning and good enough for this next version barring any unforeseen issues.
- Animation Leaning – setup a preliminary lean when characters suddenly change velocity. WIP.
- Block Push – got the large block push functioning with the new motor. Good enough for the next version.
- Height Damage – damage from high heights is back, but this time testing out damage by Y-axis velocity instead of a distance check.
Also, he has been working on swapping the other critters to use the new motor setup such as horses, bats, etc. so far so good. Horse animation has seen some improvements:
- Leans when turning/changing velocity, similarly to bipeds.
- Addition of sideways locomotion animation and blending (strafing).
The motor rework has led Jon to some miscellaneous motor-related stuff as well, such as integrating Dexterity. Some notables:
- Slower movement speed backwards. Higher Dexterity will nullify the penalty. Now, 100 Dexterity will allow you to move the same speed backwards as forwards.
- Dexterity should now scale your getup speed.
- Roll stamina cost is affected by burden now.
- Testing out a slide on steep slopes and ragdolling if sliding too much. Very much WIP.
SPRING CLEANING
On top of that, Jon has also taken quite a bit of time to clean up the project. As he puts it, "a game of this scope seems to quickly devolve into spaghetti."
- Removing old unused/duplicate scripts
- Renaming scripts/classes/variables/folders. Lot of names that just don’t make sense or make things harder to find.
- Moving OnDrawGizmos code to OnDrawGizmosSelected – the scene view was getting pretty messy and bogging down. :/
- Cleaning out old/unnecessary static events.
MISC. IMPROVEMENTS
- Trajectory calculations for NPCs
- They can actually throw up and down now!
- They also lead their targets which makes them a bit more accurate.
- Timely block: pressing, and holding, the block button close to the time an attack would hit you will now result in a timely block. This improves the effectiveness of a block, especially with weapons.
- Setup slow-motion if the framerate drops too low.
- Changed crests for each arena team.
- Increased the intensity of moonlight a bit.
- Worked on improving hairstyles, adding some new ones too. A preview:
(Bevy of new/improved hairstyles.)
- Reworking Input Device querying so input devices assigned in the Party Setup scene carry over to gameplay. Seems to work so far.
- Reworking user save directories. Using an auto-generated ID for the initial folders now to allow multiple characters with the same name.
- Lowered weight of gold.
- Optimized some buildings.
- Optimized glass shader, which consequently optimized buildings too.
We have managed to fix quite a few bugs, but found more as well… They’re most likely things broken after the last demo release so we won’t get into those.
Jon also been working on some new fancy Unity build tools along with some automation, as making builds continues to take up quite a bit of time. He's managed to setup weekly builds using Jenkins.
There may or may not be a new area in the works as well.
We’re getting there…
