Flaming June

It's summer, it's flaming June.

Expectation ...

Versus reality ...

But then eventually ...

And now it's back to wearing a jumper :/

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.