Cut And Thrust And Bleed And Ack-

A melee of Norse versus KievRus versus Saxons at the back

Warbands now look the part, with each individual faction having it's own style and shield markings, because in the middle of a disorganized melee it's not always easy to tell who the hell is who.

So, without further ado, let's have a quick rundown.

 

Avar Warband

The Lombards - could have been the Franks but France features more later on

The Saxons, featuring the cool Sutton Hoo helm

The Norse, not a horned helmet in sight thankfully

KievRus

The Magyars, pre-paprika

The Normans (boo!)

 And so we have our initial warbands, and I am only up to the 11th Century. Whilst shields and helmets tend to be unique to each faction, the lower ranking peasant levies do tend to rather look the same, so I might have to add warband specific patches. Back in the days of the Anglo-Scot Border Reivers warriors would wear the cross or saltaire on cloth pinned to their armour ... usually with the other flag on the back incase they wanted to swap sides mid-battle ...

With all the warbands now equipped - at least except for bows as I haven't out the code needed for archery just yet, but it is coming - I needed to bring home the awesomeness of hitting someone with a poleaxe. For this I hunted around for some of the old death animations which I had got for Airship Dragoon and modified them for the new rigging system which my current models use.

 And so the whole thing comes together with slashing sounds, the ring of parried metal, fountains of blood and the screams of the mortally wounded!

Pumpkin!

And of course it has been All Hallows Eve. Can you believe that there are some folks who carve a pumpkin but don't scoop all the food out? That was 1.5kg of seasonal veg going waste! I bag it up into portions and stick it in the spare freezer ... which turned out to still have last year's pumpkin in it because I'd forgotten all about it. More pumpkin on the menu now!

Next up for Untitled Medieval Warband Game - a land fit for heroes! Time to make an actual level with terrain and points of interest for looting, to give raiding parties something to raid.

Flaming July Raining July

 

Behold, 693 materials converted to PBR - but the models LOD out quick so you can't see that here - trustMeBro™

July has ended as Flaming June started ... flaming wet. The chances of a good strawberry crop in August diminish by the second.

Work wise, every single object in Monsters Loot Swag has been updated to the latest engine version and the fancy-pants visuals of Physical Based Rendering (PBR). All 693 materials have been changed to get rid of the diffuse and specular mapping, and brand spanking PBR compiltable albedo and Occlusion / Roughness / Metallic (ORM) maps have been created. I also settled on a standard 512 pixel size for the vast majority of objects as they are not large enough during gameplay to warrant textures any bigger (except bigger boss monsters and the such which are now 1024 pixel maps). All of this should also help reduce the total memory footprint for texture loading.

This new version of Monsters Loot Swag will be initially available as a beta on Steam, before later becoming the standard game version.

Boris The Spoder-Tank reflecting a rather barren test level in real-time™

All of the terrains for the already completed 7 levels (3 more to do) have also been updated to the latest engine build, and are now filled with reflection probes to simulate the area around specific features.

A reflection probe before I realized I had to embiggen™ the capture radius to get objects to reflect in it

Slowly and methodically porting the game to the new engine has caused a few issues, namely my previous disregard for naming conventions. Many files ended up being called "thing_x_new4_v08_redux_final_final2" and then added to a profile, but the new engine uses an asset system so suddenly naming is important, and the file's name becomes the profile name. This was further confounded by previously having multiple files of the same name in different folders, so a fair bit of renaming has occurred, especially in the 262 audio files which needed to be called the name of their profiles.

So, next up is getting the actual old gameplay logic to work with the new asset system. I am optimistic that this will not be too difficult and that the main issues will revolve around some renaming of server and client connection commands. As ever I prefer to work methodically so that I can actual see where things have changed and understand how the new processes work - which seems infinitely preferable to ham-fistedly ramming the whole game into the "convert to new build button" and then wondering why everything is a mangled arse afterwards.

Hopefully August will also see a return to some decent sunny weather and I can get back to shorts and a t-shirt rather than continue building an Ark in a jumper ... we live, as ever, in hope ...

Damp Island is Damp

It seems to have been raining forever - at this rate there will be no water left for April to have showers ...

Monsters Loot Swag has had it's 13th Early Access Update! This fixed a whole load of minor issues and one major one - the awful openAL crossfade falloff has finally been slain ... with, naturally, a 2 line fix. 😫

Turns out it all that was needed was to feed openAL an ini file to tell it to stop dropping the fall off so early.

Also our leggy, harness encased, propeller powered catgirl has been testing an engine upgrade with glorious PBR! For which I made a Cornell Box in Blender 3D.

Reflections! Shiny, shiny reflections!

Now, updating the whole game to a new engine build which features not only shiny stuff like PBR, but an entire modular system is going to take some time. 

However, talking about new engine builds with funky modular features, I have been coding an animation based melee combat system in C++.

So far I have light and heavy attacks, activated by either tap or hold input. Both kinds of strike share a single Prepare Attack Animation, which works like a charge-up, and is based on weapon type. Light attacks are randomized, whilst heavy attacks are based on player input at the end of Prepare Attack Anim.

Each weapon has it's own attack speed and the player themselves have a "rage meter" which increases attack speed with the more blows they land on an opponent.

There are also primary and secondary types of damage, for instance a broadsword is primarily for slashing but can also stab. I plan on introducing different styles of armour (gambeson, lamellar, chain, plate, etc) which offer varied protection against the major types of attack damage of slash, blunt and stab.

Here's an animated gif showing a light thrusting attack - this was before I added weapon specific speed modifiers.

Light Attack - Yellow Circle Capturing Button Input

So that it was it for the wash out of a month which was March. I had was planning on setting up the Spring duvet for my bedding, but it's been so miserable and cold I think I will stick with the Winter duvet for another month. 😰

Halloween Horror Space Year 2022

Behold The True Horror This Halloween!

 More terrifying than any cosmic horror dredged from the neurosis of HP Lovecraft ... it's the global debt clock! 

Okay ... have you recovered from this ghastly Halloween fright? Then we shall continue with October's dev blog.

Finally I discovered the true source of a long running bug. I have spent months slowly chipping away at this bug, narrowing down the source and timing, even fixing the crash and suppressing the Out Of Bounds Array messages. Should have known that it would be an audio emitter issue.😫

 So it turned out that a lot of events happen when a player buy's Swag in Monsters Loot Swag, effects sparkle, audio plays, icons appear, objects spawn, marker objects hide and if there's a lot of other stuff happening at the same time ... and it's a game where there's always a lot of stuff happening at the same time ... the audio emitter can get out of synch when it wants to disable.

The solution was to stop everything from happening in the same engine tick with a simple schedule to make it all happen in order, giving the audio emitter a good half second to turn itself off and make sure it's ghost update of the network doesn't go tits up. Hurray, fixed and understood the cause. 😓

And speaking of audio bugs ... years ago I  noticed that sometimes the audio went ... iffy. It would start going off-key and warble intermittently. Not long before shipping the start of the Early Access game on Steam, I realized that this was caused by the camera being offset from the player location and thus camera and player could end up fighting for who got the audio source, with the sound cutting out if the camera was further away from the audio. At the time I threw in an emergency workaround by making the radius of all audio emitters large enough to swallow the camera.

Eventually I got around to coding a proper solution, use the camera rotation and the player object's location. This took a fair bit of maths as I could not remember which column of the matrix transforms I required to get to mix together ... until help on the Torque Game Engine Discord Server pointed out that there were already helper functions for matrixes and I could just use matrix.getPosition(); in cpp - boy did I feel dumb. 😅

The Takiyasha Ornamental Water Garden - early image

So, I have spent this month working on Level 6 for the next big update ... which I was hoping to have released this week but will probably take longer as I have redesigned the boss monster twice aleady. It's the Takiyasha Ornamental Water Garden and it builds on the environmental hazards which I introduced previously in Level 5. Behold water! Water is an environmental hazard as it slows down both the player and enemy monsters. I have designed the level so that if the player wants to get somewhere fast they're wanting to go through the water, but slow movement and enemy missiles are bad, so the player could decide to stay out of the water and go around it, thus preserving speed and the ability to dodge better.

I've also coded a lava type of liquid which only damages the player - more on that in Level 7.

Level 6 early testing gameplay

Level 6 is the home of the Stone Golems, high DPS, low HP, but very strong, range-based player characters have much lower strength than melee ones and so have a hard time barging them aside, and can easily get surrounded and trapped.

Once I finish up the level boss, Lady  Kaeru The Horticulturist, who is not going to fight you, and her giant champion who is going to fight you, I will be uploading the third big update to Steam, and the Early Access game of Monsters Loot Swag will be around 60% complete.

In the meantime, don't have nightmares! https://worlddebtclocks.com