The pub is open and the wind is cold. It's a Bank Holiday weekend, of course the weather is going to be terrible. I had a huge scone with jam and cream.
This month I have been modeling planes, 3 of them, and 9 different skins for 9 different factions. Part of the way through I discovered that the PBR map - known as a ORM map - actual stands for the order in which PBR goes into the channels and that I had got my Rough and my Occlusion the wrong way round. This explained why my ambient occlusion didn't look very ambiently occluded ... Having fixed this for all 4 damage levels, I could continue modeling new planes.
The Nakajima Type 91-1 actually did come in orange. I have no idea what Japan thought they could hide this amongst, perhaps tubs of satsumas? Here it is with the Tokugawa Shogunate emblem replacing the Japanese flag due to Deepest Lore™.
This thing really doesn't look safe and has a pretty poor damage rating, but it is agile.
Previously I had completed the Curtiss F-11C Goshawk and so set about making various skins for it. You will probably spot the theme of 19th Century Qing Dynasty due to Deepest Lore™. Here comes a lot of image spam.
Chinese Republican "Dare To Die Corps"
Cuba because it was an actual thing so I though why not ...
Qing Dynasty
Kansu Braves - referred to by the Western MSM as "The 10,000 Islamic Rabble" but was actually the Qing's elite fighting force of Islamic soldiers sworn loyalty to the Empress Dowager.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom - a ... wait for it ... Theocrat Anarcho-Communist Absolute Monarchy led by a guy who declared himself the younger brother of Jesus. Unlike Jesus he murdered 20 million people in 14 years.
Black Flag Army - Cantonese bandits who created hell for the French in Indochina.
Fists of Harmonious Justice - Boxer Rebellion
Five Banner Alliance - more anti-Qing, anti-foreigner secret society
Damage models for the Yellow Flag Army, pirates of Canton - sporting the pirate flag from AIrship Dragoon
Plikarpov I-15bis from the Imperial Russian Air Service, poor maneuverability but fantastic quad Maxim machine guns.
Polikarpov I-15bis in Chinese Republican colours
Overhead damage models of the I15-bis (top) and F11C Goshawk (bottom)
Testing vapour trails, which needed a bit of "fixing" for the source code
Here's a video of me testing vapour trails in combat.
And that was the month that pubs finally reopened.
Next up, more skins for the Nakajima, and perhaps one more aircraft before attempting to make an actual game senario with it all. Toodlepip!
Steamworks updated yet again, so it was back to the; "how do I update Airship Dragoon again?" Seemed less hassle than usualy so I must have remembered how to integrate the Steam Client C++ this time around. Whilst giving it a quick test drive to make sure that it actual did work, I started to look through some of the old spaghetti code I had written all those many moons ago.
Comment out the old code on my local distro - incase I suddenly needed to change it back - I changed how panic works, making it more aggressive so that the troopers will always panic shoot if available and only flee if not. I also tweaked some animations and got impact reactions to being wounded, so the troopers now flinch when hurt. People did ask for this when I first released it but messing around with animation code was all rather confusing at the time so I avoided it. Oh well, seven years too late et al but here it is. Luckily I still had a 14 year old version of Blender available - otherwise I would have had to re-export every character and animation into the new format and that wasn't about to be a thing that was going to happen.
I'd also like to change the box art, branding and main menu screen art some time ... but one thing at a time.
Back to the current world of coughs and chaos, I spent the sunny days lounging about with a bottle or two of plonk, getting a tan - or at least turning quite red at some point.
Eventually I did get back to devving on the current - or at least occaisonal - project. One main character does not make a game, except all those games with a single main character of course ... However I was rather planning on having multiple playable characters based on weapon playstyle, so inbetween freezing fog, scorching sun and heavy rain, I eventually got round too booting up Blender and making another character. Whilst the original "GunGirl" was a long range fighter, this character is more short to medium range, with heavy hitting but slow attacks. Still need to PBR the shotgun - not that the current gameplay build is PBR, it's still stuck in the land of Dx9.0c until I upgrade to DX11/12.
So, next up is to finish off LODs, create an atlas map of textures and materials to reduce the all important drawcall number, rig up some animations (based on the previous character animations) and then get the model working in-game. The code for the character is done and works fine, having been a placeholder box for some time already.
Doing it wrong! The story of my life. An act in 3 parts - hopefully ...
I had forgotten how to make characters.
How did I make this? Absolutely no idea.
I hadn't written anything down. I knew the software involved but the actual steps? No idea. So I started again from scratch, intending to make a better system and this time wrote everything down.
I ended up writing a long thread on how I got a model from makeHuman, into Blender, and ready to import it into open source game engine Torque3D. You can veiw that here.
Now importing a mesh into Blender tends to come with a whole lot of transforms which Torque just doesn't like. The main being facing the wrong direction as in-game, negative Y is forward. So for the last nth years I have been seperating meshes and armatures and editing them so they face the correct way and then aligning them manually. This gets rid of all the wonky transforms and sets everything to a nice default 0, 0, 0. That way I can - hopefully - put any other animation into the armature.
This is all very faffy.
Whilst changing the default pose by using the "apply visual pose as rest pose" I was struck by a sudden thought; wouldn't it be nice if object mode had an apply transforms option? Thus I could pose the model with the correct facings and just apply each object, armature, mesh, etc with a click to default it all to zero. And guess what? It does have that button already.
Well ... crap. I've been causing myself unfathomable amounts of problems for god knows how many years by manually rotating everything by selecting all the vertexes of each object, turning them, and trying to line everything back up by eye - when all I had to do was click a button.
So ... talking about doing it wrong, there's more.
I've been going about making my game wrong. Or avoiding making it would be more accurate. This is partly - or even mostly - due to a helpful blogpost by a developer that talks about Steam. Why is it helpful but made me lose focus on actual development? Because of wishlists on Steam and drumming up future sales. He pointed out that his previous and very successful games had a Steam store presence 1.5 years prior to launch which meant that he had managed to accrue 33,000 wishlists. So when he was finally ready to ship, 33K people got an email telling them it was available. Even steam suggests getting at least 50K before release.
I have half my levels completed, all my monsters for each level save the bosses, and complete working game code that makes it all playable even if some pieces are missing. But I don't have anything public facing. I have no cool box art or even working main menu screen. I could have done this previously but I was too fixated on making the actual game work that I never even took into account that I needed to get potential player support early on and that means having a working Steam store page with nice artwork that brings people in, adds backstory and concept. I don't even have a title for my game other than the temporary working one. In fact my previous game; Airship Dragoon had no final title until the month it went on sale.
Here is a link to the full article. Here's another one on wishlists.
It's the end of the year highlights show - which I am fairly certain no one likes. So first, here's what happened in December.
I got PTSD from Christmas shopping. Shopping is a terrible thing at any time of year but when the entire country is in panic mode over a certain approaching date this gets amplified even more.
I put on half a stone (that's 7lb or 45grams in new money) in 4 days, and the amount of nibbles that I still have lying around doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon.
I got back into modeling - you know, that thing that I am actually supposed to be doing - and created an animation for the defensive airstrike powerup.
And here's a video of it all in action. It's a defensive powerup so it has a chance to be triggered whenever the player takes damage.
So onto the boring recap.
With the addition of tentacles, I finally completed all the basic enemies and their various special attacks, finally relegating the need for the red placeholder cube enemies which had been the standard for x years too many.
Levels started to get designed (I am about half way through them) and the flat grid world was finally relegated to history.
I eventually upgraded to the latest version of Blender 2.8, after having previously been using the 2007 version which I had found more than adequate for the last 12 years - read as; I don't like unnecessary change for it seems to be a right old faff around.
This change was partially enforced as it deleted another Blender version 2.7 I used for editing normals when v2.8 installed and then it was a simple case of "oh bugger, no going back now".
Thus I was forced by circumstance and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to get with the 21st century and learn how to export models and animations anew.
The good thing about upgrading to the latest version of Blender was that PBR suddenly became available, though it was another thing to learn on-top of everything else. Whilst I work on PBR related materials and design, my main test engine is still Dx9.0c for the time being, but will be updated later to brand new fancy Physically Based Rendering capable Dx11.
Ears go up ...
Ears go down ...
Placeholder Player yellow cube was also retired, and replaced with what will hopefully be the first of several playable characters. It's GunGirl, leggy catgirl strapped into a propeller driven harness.
I made a start on boss monsters for each level.
And that was the year that was. Somehow doesn't seem enough. Progress continues next year.
I've made one ...
tl;dr Some things happened, something didn't.
So onwards and upwards. Can't wait for the Olympics next year.
Are you OK? Have you recovered? Take a few deep breaths, I know it was a terrible sight ...
In other news I have mostly been injured ... from doing nothing as usual ...
My neck went, then my shoulder went ... and now my neck has gone again ...
Okidoki, that's enough sniverling - back to the blog ...
I was testing a new binary of the PBRtastic Torque 4.0 version 5.0 build when I noticed many things were amiss. After much wailing and nashing of teeth and complaining to other people at the otherside of the planet that it was everybody elses fault ... I concluded that I was using the wrong branch ...
Ahem ...
After this I managed to get some PBR catgirl with working transparency on show.
I also managed to break everything horribly by mistake ... but that just tends to be one of those things I do ... at least this time I knew how I did it so I can avoid doing that again ...
I tried to delete all of the shaders and ended up wiping out the ones which controlled the GUIs in the editor so none of the text would show up. Next time, delete the internal shaders manually ...
I had been planning on doing more on creating a new level featuring an abandoned and overgrown industrial site, but only got as far as stripping high density models down to a more workable poly number.
Pipes, need lots of pipes for industry ...
So, that was the month that was ... which ended up as a bit of a wash-out ... normal service shall hopefully resume November ... which incidentally, is the date in which Blade Runner happens ...
So after the joy/struggle/despair/awkwardness* (*delete as applicable) of learning how the new Blender3D works and then creating an actual character to replace the player's Small Yellow Placeholder Cube, it was time to go after the remaining Big Red Placeholder Cube which had been standing in for the level boss character.
As ever things went horribly wrong for seemingly know apparent reason other than the entire universe having it in for me.
I had split up animations from the actual mesh - that way it keeps loading times down whilst changing things on the fly during development, and means that multiple models with the same armature skeleton can share animation data and thus reduce file sizes - when suddenly everything stopped playing nicely and went back to mutating into a horrendous mess of twisted limbs and multiplied rotations.
The reason this time turned out to be because I was exporting the mesh model in the first frame of the root animation - which is what you would want for blended animations - but I should have exported it out in a copy of the rest pose ... regardless of the fact that this had previously been fine with another model ... which meant that the solution was far down my list of things to test to see if it worked ...
Exporting COLLADA/DAE format from Blender to Torque has become even more specific in Blender 2.8, mostly due to there being a huge number more options available and thus a huge number more things to possibly go wrong ...
I before E except after C ... Also Hierarchy which breaks the rule, and hierarchy is very important ...
I ended writing a little explanation of Blender3D to Torque3D Collada exporting and the importance of hierarchy over on the forums.
Eventually I managed to get "The Big Lad" - as he is currently known unless I can think up a name later - into the game and working. Here's a quick look at him in action. I say "quick" because he squashed me in not too much time. Select quality 720x60fps manually or youtube's autoHD says it's selected it but it's telling fibs.
I fearsome foe! Especially as I end up as pate ...
Apart from that, I modified my laser-beam-wielding veclociraptors by adding helmets and power-packs to them so that they now look different from the other dinosaurs which just bite.
Sharks Dinosaurs, with frikken laser beams on their heads!
I also spent some time modelling industrial scenery, lots of pipes and stuff for a forthcoming level. This will be the fifth level in the game, out of a total of ten - though they will loop for long play. No actual pictures of that yet as it is still all in bits.
So, that was the month that was. It got really warm and now Autumn has truly arrived and I've put socks on. Lot's of other things happened game development-wise but I can't really remember them. Next up is the Overgrown Industrial Level which has been reclaimed by nature, and more boss monsters.
