TAR Feb-March Dev Update news

Hello there! Here's what our development has entailed (or what is worth-showing) for these last two months:

• Some close-ups: more props have been added around, including the Great Hall & braziers outside.

• The Castle has seen some improvements, including some redesigning (walls added/etc). It also shows the new stone texture (seen also in the Town below).

• Both the path & path edge/wall stone textures have been reworked. Therefore, the paths will be different than the sides.

• Dalwood has gone through some revisions since last shown. Now the grounds include splatmaps, as in other scenes, and various landscape changes – looking furthermore like a forest.

• This is seen in the Harbor scene. It may be of greater importance later…

• Log Cabin

• Into the woods

• “Soon” they’ll be in bloom all around Terradim in the Spring.

Jon has been working on the revised character motor. Some spoils include:

• Locomotion animations better match the speed that you are actually moving – there’s less "feet sliding."
• External forces such as a river pushing you downstream – is now possible!
• Incorporated steering behaviors add flexibility to character movement. He was testing NPCs with a random wander force, added on to some of their battle movements. So far it seems to be working!
• Footstep sounds
• Burden affecting speed
• Lunge-attack
• Swimming (WIP)
• Tree Climbing (WIP)
• Haven't fallen through the town's ground colliders yet! :)

Swimming and tree climbing are almost back to where they were, but still have some issues with vertical movement.

An additional goody that has resulted from this past month’s motor work.

• Wading speed – your movement speed will decrease as you walk into deeper water.

Once the new motor is “good-enough,” then v0.2 should be ready to go! There are quite a few bugs to get, however…

One thing we've worked on, over these past couple of months, is the adaptation of our splatmap shader to use world UVs. What’s “world UVs” you ask? It’s where the UVs, or how the textures/maps are laid out across the meshes, are calculated in world space, rather than the mesh’s local UV space. This allows separate meshes’ textures to line-up and the tilings to be the same (independent of their UV size/layout), thus reducing development time – which is important for this game! Now, only the splat color control (for deciding which texture goes where) uses the actual mesh’s UVs. Some sources I looked at to help with this shader are:

• On triplanar mapping: Catlikecoding.com
• Triplanar shader example: Github.com

As you can see, world UVs are the same across all faces in world space (independent of UV scale, rotation, or orientation). It's not perfect, there's some issues with certain angles/normals where there is minor stretching, but it'll do for now.

The tiling of the textures was also an issue, as they were tiled in some larger scenes up to 100 times or greater on their materials. We are not sure if that would hurt performance or not…

• Scene Subtitles: certain scene names now have subtitles. The Town & Upper Town are renamed: Town, with Market District & Arena District, respectively.

• Attacking changes: as mentioned in a previous post you can now land multiple hits in a single swing. This past month added some additional improvements to it such as a slight delay for each landed hit.

• Added Camera shutter and flash when taking a snapshot in game (currently F12).
• NPC Dialog improvements:
  • If an NPC is delayed when trying to initiate dialog, once/if they do afterwards they can greet you differently.
  • Setup a preliminary chat count for NPCs where they get tired of talking.
• Yet more prefab work converting to variants/using nesting.
• NPCs look at the person they’re talking to now:

That’s all for now, until next time.