Melee Working Redux

 

Last Month's Blender Animations Are This Month's Game Animations

I cleaned up my dev folder system, mostly because it had no particular system at all, and was just a mess of folders dumped into a single directory. Over the years this had grown to a somewhat considerable number of test builds, most of which were pointless duplications. Tidy all of this up into a few folders based on simple concepts such as "Game Builds", "Test Builds", "Modules", etc has made everything a lot easier to find.

The only casualty to all of this was the deletion of my Melee Build Test Area, which I had thought was just another test area, however it included some more up to date melee code than the named Melee Project. However it was not particularly advanced so came as no great loss, and whilst redoing the now deleted extra pieces, I actually improved them.

I imported my previously rotoscoped animations into the game engine, and set up a character to use them. With a bit of tinkering all worked as intended, though I have since edited the standard run animation as it contained quite a sharp hip flick which in turn sent the character's butt cheeks into rather a frenzy. This has since been toned down.

Next up was to reinstate hitBoxes to the character limbs. Unfortunately some of the bones rotations had developed a nasty roll , which sent the hitBoxes for the legs into a strange position and so I proceeded to fix this, and annoyingly all the animations which I had previously made had to be redone. Thankfully it was only the legs which needed retuning.

From Hell's Heart I Give You A Good Pokey-Pokey!

HitBox testing worked well, and I even changed the code as to how strikes work. When I had first written the melee code last year, I had for some reason had great trouble trying to get a box mounted on the weapon to use as a strikeBox against the target's hitBoxes, and had in the end settled for an armature bone system to measure between the bones for the length of the attack. 

I say "for some reason" because it all seemed quite straightforward now to set up a box on the weapon for collision, get it's measurement and offset from the handle/mounting point. So the hacky bone node system was retired in favour of the collision box size and offset being automatically stored on datablock preloading. And if there is no box to provide collision for the weapon, it will fallback to using the bounds box and work out it's offset from the mountPoint. So, not sure why all of this proved hugely difficult last year, but I expect "tunnel vision" which seems to happen quite a bit in game development.

The Cold Steel! They Don't Like It Up 'Em!

Expanding the original melee code, which already had a fatigue and rage system, I added stagger depending on how much damage the target had taken versus how much they had remaining. Stagger breaks the target's attack and defence, potentially leaving them open for a free strike. The lower the target's HP, the more they will stagger.

It took a bit of trial and error to prevent the code getting stuck in certain animations, but after a while I ironed out all the obvious bugs. I also rewrote how falling damage works, introducing a plummet system were the player just drops face first, and if damage on impact is high enough a custom plummetDeathAnim plays.

Elden Ring Style Stat Bar Reduction

The player Stat Bars on the GUI got an overhaul, when health or energy is lost the original level is now shown as a different colour and reduces until it meets the current Stat level, a bit like it does in Elden Ring (no I haven't played it, but I am aware it is a thing, and a thing with Stat Bars which do this).

The weapon FSM system got a whole overhaul, and light and heavy attacks now trigger in a way which does not require the player loop to count, freeing up a couple of write/read stream vars. A quick released attack button sets the FSM to interrupt the state and send a light attack var, whilst holding it allows the state to complete for a heavy attack.

There was probably a lot more "stuff" that got done, but I can't remember it all off the top of my head here.

Flaming June was more damp squib June for the second year running, and the strawberry patch appears to have already given up the ghost.

It's halfway through the year already which only goes to show how painfully slow game development is. 😩