Space Year 2025

 🎵 In the year 2525 ... if man is still alive ... 🎵

Well I feel barely alive in the year 2025 ... mostly due to having come down with the lurgy ... or the space lizards frying my brain with their invisible doom ray - sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Fun Fact: I met the guy who did the intro to that song and my dad jammed with him a few times.

Work to complete Monsters Loot Swag continues in earnest. With all of the cosplaying catgirl characters that the player can unlock and control now compelte, it all comes down to designing the final level and final level boss.

For the last map I've gone for a HR Giger / Z Beskinski surealist horror aesthetic. This has required me to make a lot of custom textures, which have been taking up the greatest part of this, the first month of the year. After a while I found my eyes going funny looking at all this stuff.

The Final Countdown With The Final Level

All the rank and file enemies for the final level were designed some time ago, and naturally there will be tentacles, for, as we all know, tentacles are the natural predator of overly excitable catgirls. Once the final level is complete I need to make the level boss and then just a bit more 2D artwork for the randomized "souvenir" system which is already in place and comes with three whole Steam Achievements.

After that I think I'll do a little rebranding of the Steam capsules with some new artwork.

And then it's shipping, come hell or high water.

Early Access has been somewhat disappointing without a single useful crash report in the forums, but alas I expect this is just the price of being a brokeass non-name indie dev in a literally sea of brokeass no-name indie devs. The most useful thing was when the engine got updated to give me feedback on misnamed script errors, something the script IDE alas doesn't. This helped me fix a fair few wrongly named or non-established local variables, the sort of thing that could and probably did cause crashes.

I still have all my Steam Visibility Rounds available for full release, so we will see if that helps boost eyes on at final release time. I remember it working quite well for Airship Dragoon but that was 10 years ago with considerably less released products jostling for attention. Anyhow, we won't know until we launch.

So next game ... how to get eyes on game at release? Early Access gets drowned out so I'm thinking maybe an open beta? Just let folks actually have a play around with a basic but working build and see if they fancy wishlisting it? Well it's a thought, and I don't have any others that cost zero dollars, so we'll probably go down that route.

January is over already, that's like 8 percent of the year gone, which is about as horrifying as it already being Space Year 2025.

Anyhow, back to going googly eyed with Gigeresque texturing ... 🥴

Novemeber Cometh November Goeth

 

November has come and gone in what felt like record timing. The Steam Autumn/Fall sale is underway and I threw in Airship Dragoon for the Steam Awards category "Labor of Love", due to updating it after nine years on Valve's platform. More on that available on Steam.

November was a blur of getting the dreaded lurgy - which seemed to take forever and half a million hot toddies to clear, and testing, testing, testing ...

Testing many, many things ... 

Such as trying to lower the polycount on Monsters Loot Swag models. Previously I had used an automated plugin to reduce polycount for Level Of Detail, however this made a horrible mess of UV mapping. So I decided to try Blender's own decimation tools such as "UnSubDivide" - which would surely reduce edgeloops by simply unsubdividing the mesh ... yeah, well, actually it didn't ...

Unsubdivide edgeloops ... unsubdivides right?

Almost like it does one half of the body fine, then gets bored and just compresses the edgeloops and swaps to the other half of the body.

I am not a fan of retopology because I do not understand why it cannot be automated perfectly - especially on a model with perfectly equal edgeloops. This is the exact sort of soul destroying donkey work which should be easily automated and technically is automated if you want it to be a shyte ...

I did try a number of other programs - which I believe cool kids call "apps" these days on the grounds any word over four letters is too difficult or energy consuming to utter. One of these was MeshLab which seemed to do a fairly decent job at reducing 25K to 7K, though I still felt should have saved the UV map better. Or I could just manually retopo, but as I have avoided doing that for years I don't really want to start now ... especially as getting mesh deformation to not be shyte seems to be even more of a pain in the arse ... see below.

In addition to polycounts there has also been a whole host of messing around with the newer aspects of the engine which has been the focus of the Monsters Loot Swag BETA test build. This has been a lot of testing, fixing, streamlining and bug reporting, all of which are slowly but surely going into improving the engine and game build, though at the moment there is nothing too concrete to show as a game update.

But back to low poly.

Low poly Lara with some good low poly deformation techniques

I started making a low poly character, in a somewhat stylized plane based style. Nigh on 30 years ago I actually sculpted this type of head in concrete with a metal frame made of metal coat hangers... which proved to be a mistake when attempting to move it anywhere as I had not made it hollow, and so it weighed a ton.

Low poly mesh deformation is somewhat more of a pain in the butt than normal. Got a bad deform when bend bones? No problems, slap more edgeloops in and jiggle them about a bit. Except this cannot be done when you are modeling a plane based low poly humanoid.

Back of the elbow needs to come out somewhat

The simpler meshes get, the more horrendous deformation becomes, and the more difficult retaining versus collapsing polys are.

This is all being done for two purposes, one is for a potential low poly with hard edges/planes style future project, and the second is for more practise in reducing topology whilst keeping good movement deformation for current work.

In other news, it's cold and damp. The Pentalon Javelins - that's a type of winter spud that is harvestable at Christmas, and not a 1950s RAF experimental supersonic jet fighter; though it really sounds like it should have been -  appear to have died a death, going the way of this year's strawberry crop under the chronic wetness. I've been eyeing up designs of a padded gambeson to try and survive winter and also padded armour may help survive the GREAT HAPPENING when the lights go out and society crumbles.

December approaches ... and don't even get me started on Space Year 2024.

The Dreaded Lurgy

 

 

The Dreaded Lurgy is a Rare SWAG Power-up. It is an Attack Based event which causes the targeted MONSTER to succumb to the Dreaded Lurgy. The infected MONSTER is highly contagious and will transmit the Dreaded Lurgy to any other MONSTER who they come into contact with. However, after receiving the dark gift of the Dreaded Lurgy, the victim is now immune from further infection.

Annoyingly this is also a thing in real life, and I have spent the last month suffering from The Langshan-Po Lurgy - a free internet to anyone who gets the reference, but Gen-X (greatest generation) here, is probably just showing his age.

Needless to say 3D vector maths, gimbals, quaternions, cpp and general cerebral activity, has been somewhat compromised with lurgy brain fog. In celebration at the cerebral degradation - which hopefully will only be temperory - I have revised, both the icon and the in-game activation event art, for

The Dreaded Lurgy.

However during this time, Steam has snuck out a new update to Steamworks (v1.56) ... which broke previous coded SteamGameServer::getAuthentication - thank you Valve devs for the code comments which gave a good explaination of the new changes. 

The Steam update for Monsters Loot Swag is here.

It has also spent all month raining again - just like last month. So it turned out in the end there really was enough rain for April showers. In the midst of all these downpours there has been a frequent visitor, and pidgeon numbers are being reduced.

Who's a pretty boy, then?

In the world of melee combat coding I decided to try a new way of doing things and ended up on some terrible code carousel, going round and round in circles - and having the Dreaded Lurgy did not help brain function. 

I had wanted to look down a list of the target's hitboxes and check if they were within the bounds of a weapon's hitbox. This caused far more problems than I had preceived, with a total lack of being able to get the transforms and orientation of the hitbox meshes within the model. When I could get the hitbox mesh itself it wouldn't allow me to translate it to into world space because it was the wrong class, when I had world space I could not access the hitbox mesh because that was then the wrong class.

I could test a strike against the target bounds and check for intersecting but then to get the actual hitboxes still required using a raycast against all hitboxes to get their transforms and then suddenly we were into more load than I had before.

Dave is made of hitboxes and the raycast is checking alignment of the forearm hitbox

 The only thing I can think of is to create a whole series of points within each of the target's hitboxes and and then check the Box3F of the weapon hitbox against all these points --- and once again we are into even more load, and not the less I was hoping for with just intersection checks of boxes.

Giving all of this up as a bad job, I decided to use the 4 main edges of the weapon hitbox and fire a raycast down each length for more accuracy than a single, central raycast check. This has turned out to be infinitely simpler than going down a list of up to 20 hitboxes checking for intersections.

I also coded up a fatigue system for heavy attacks, sprinting and swimming, and completely rewrote how fall damage works. I started to add attribute statistics for the player, which are fairly similiar to standard RPG stuff with STR, DEX, CON, etc, and the start of a leveling and experience system.

Next up will be to code classes and jobs with bonuses for these attributes on how fast experience points boost them.

Next month I am not certain whether I will continue with the melee action RPG prototype or start porting Monsters Loot Swag to the newest an shiniest version of the engine - I expect it will be a bit of both.

The Dreaded Lurgy is finally subsiding and I am down to a dry and somewhat sore throat with an occaisional dry cough. A pox upon the ... er ... pox!