That Was The Year That Was: Space Year 2023

 

2023 comes to an end ... and if I am honest, it was kinda non-descript ...

So what actually happened? I have no idea, but it did include me porting Monsters Loot Swag to the latest version of the game engine - available here for FREE under MIT license - and all it's glorious new fangled stuff like asset systems and Physical Based Rendering (PBR).

Have you seen this PBR'd catgirl?

You have now!

So, anyhow, the latest engine version of Monsters Loot Swag got a BETA, whilst I fixed a few things up on that version to bring it more into line with the default v.3.x which I had initially uploaded to Steam - not that I got the feedback and testing which I was hoping for, but hey, that's just one of those things. The v.4.x Beat build did come with it's own script compiler which was invaluable to finding scripting issues which the the default version would not. I will probably retire the default Steam version and replace it with the Beta as standard moving forwards. 

Have you seen how to opt into the Beta?

You have now!

 I also beat Micro$oft at it's own game when it locked me out of the source code for Airship Dragoon, and managed to finally put out a new update with the latest version of Steam.

Have you seen this Airship Dragoonette?

 You have now!

Have you seen this Sparrowhawk?

Well he spotted me first ... I mean what did he want? It's not like I can just feed him juicy blackbirds, which judging from the carnage near the veg patch, is his sole diet.

In other news I managed to survive five (5) whole decades on God's blessed earth, I think wearing a sallet for the whole time helped.

In other news I have made good progress with my GAMBESON which I have designed specifically to survive Winter with when heating prices go through the roof, or someone Kalibrates the UK gas pipeline, and yes, season should have caps. I am currently messing around with the edging at the moment and need to sort the arms out and some strapping for the front which is double layered in a slightly eastern fashion. No prizes for the sewing aesthetic but it will hold together. 

It's surprising how sore my finger and thumb has got just from holding a needle.

Once I get chance, I will return to my medieval hack-and-slash-cum-RPG idea which I have already coded combat up for, but really now need some 3D artwork and animations, and I'm thinking of a lowpoly aesthetic with that. 

I also intend to port my old aeronauticals air combat game demo to the latest version of the game engine and release it for testing. To be honest if I go back to that I might make it low-poly too as that seems to be faster with production. It's a style which certainly did not do Valheim et al any harm.

Another 365 days are gone, so you for the next 365 ... unless it's a leap year some time ...

Happy New Year!

Flaming June Raining June

June started with a jumper, June ends with a jumper

 June ends as it started ... wearing a jumper. Thankfully the bit in the middle was scorchio and I took advantage of the free vitamin D and got a nice tan. My veg patch also got a good soaking and the emergency water barrels filled up.

June has primarily been upgrading Monsters Loot Swag to a new engine build. This requires me to change all the materials from Diffuse/Spec to albedo/ORM for all of those fancy PBR reflections... and that means updating all 693 of them ... (note to self; next game go for flat shading).

Player Characters and bushes get the PBR treatment

Catgirl T-Poses over the nettles to assert dominance

HDR has proven to be somewhat of an issue in all of this - initially because I didn't realized that it was switched on by default, having not used it in previous version of the game or engine, and is now on as default. This led to some awkward automated changes in exposure for filmic tonemapping based on camera position.

Eventually, after a little fiddling with sliders and values I settled on an interpretation of ACES filmic tonemapping.

Stock ACES tonemapping with auto-Contrast - pass the light blub

Manually defined auto-contrast values for a sunny day

Whilst all of this was going on I ended up helping out with a new implementation of parallax mapping.

Old parallax mapping

New parallax mapping

Yes but actually no!

This is the start of a change in how parallax mapping works in the engine, with the original version being replaced with a brand spanking new Parallax Occlusion Mapping. And this is what that looks like! (minus the occlusion casting it's own shadowing).

Definately not the same picture ...

 The POM version required a total change of art pipeline where the alpha channel receeds from maximum height of white, downwards to lowest area of black, whilst the original parallax mapping built up and outwards from the lighter values.

So far I have the characters, bushes, trees, general vegetation, all of the level objects such as rocks completely transformed into PBR mode. So, still to do are the dynamic objects, animated explosion effects, most of the terrains and all of the monsters - and as it's a game about monsters, there are rather a lot of them ...

All that to do in Flaming July - which is not a painting by Lord Leighton.

Steam Capsule Box Art

 Before we start, we should address the fact that I have communicated with the STATE APPARATUS and the APPARATCHIKS of whom have actually communicated back within the space of 60 DAYS ... which must be some sort of new world record in getting any response out of a CIVIL SERVANT - who incidentally -  are still all off work, riding their tax payer bought Pelatons at home whilst the STATE APPARATUS demands everyone else goes back to the office.

We desperately need that extra 150 quid off you to squander on some bollocks

Okidoki, vidya gaemz.

Steam has started releasing information about the Steam Deck, videos and guides are available here. Looks like competition for handhelds (eg: Switch and only Switch 'cos nobody else wants to do hardware anymore), but then do we all remember how exciting Steamboxes sounded? Maybe the handheld market is less crowded (eg: Switch and only Switch 'cos nobody else wants to do hardware anymore).

Anyhoo, the upshot of all this is that I no longer feel compelled in SPACE YEAR 2022 to bother about any display size under 720p vertical.

So I have been testing out some Steamworks features on the new game, which I have not actually uploaded yet to steamworks, but am just doing it locally with Steam loaded. This gives the rather odd result of a blank page with my game title showing online and recording my progress in-game.

Fixed a bug where I accidentally dropped napalm on the player and not the enemies ...

 Having decided that this all looks a little awkward online as only I can see my own game's presence anyhow, I decided it might be an idea if other people - eg: potential customers - could also see my game's presence, and thus we set about designing some box art for the Steam store page.

Soon(ish)™

This required me to remove the towel that is semi-permenantly draped over the display tablet that lies on the desk (it's an upturned A0 drawing board wedged against a window sill to take the weight of all the screens on it) and recharge the pen to get some reponse out of it.

Being a classically trained figurative oil painter (not that I've done any of that in 10 or 15 years ...) I do still find the methodology of digital painting to be a bit ... odd. Is it better to greyscale the form of the painting and then add another layer for blocking colour with some sort of transparency, or should I add colour with tone and shading for each stroke - which seems a right faff. Also I am not terribly enamored with the digitally replicated paint brushes as it's not really how physical medium works - at least not oil painting, especially when the brush leaves layered marks but I need to move the screen/canvas over to another part of the image without breaking the flow ...

Anyhow I have decided on a composition that looks like it can work by cropping with all of the sizes that Steam Capsule images require, and I havr blocked in some very rough tonal marks to find form and some basic colours. This in itself has made me wonder whether it would be better keeping the colouration simple as in a 3 layer comicbook style or more a more complicated and painterly style. Of course I might just do both and see.

Need to change that hair colour ...

In other news the UK had a storm which was actually a real storm rather than the usual crying wolf about some seasonal gales. Whilst a fence panel went down, the broken tiles which I had glued together with NoNails survived. One of the few weekends that hiking had to be called off due to safeguarding the house and general threat of death.

I am 50% prepared for Xmas which means I have alcohol, toilet paper and a sawn-off shotgun to protect it all. Still waiting for variant Ligma ... 😜

Takes Two To Tango With A Brief Debrief

Having mostly been a single player player ... stops, rereads that, nah we're good ... the concept of networking multiple clients wasn't something that I had particularly much experience with. This was most obvious when reviewing my C++ code and seeing that I had literally packed/unpacked everything of my custom aeronautVehicle class regardless of whether it required it or not. On further inspection only rigidBody attitude and whether it should be emitting vapour or not really needed to passed around every frame the engine updated. This could probably explain the jitteriness of Ai and other client aircraft movements.

Debugging ... (don't @ me!)

After quite a bit of faffing around I not only managed to get 4 player Co-Op mode working but had it so that other remote human clients could arrive after the mission had started, and replace the allied AI who had already spawned in their place. The Ai would smoothly disengage, move away and fade out before being deleted, hopefully out of view of other players.

Any later joining client would have to pick the remaining available flights/callsigns that human players were permitted at the briefing screen. Initially I had listed each and every callsign individually, but once I had the whole system up and running, I decided it would be better to simply list available wings and the number of taken and free roles within them. This would cut down on the possibility of scrolling through vast numbers of disabled buttons.

Co-Op Mode! Player 1 and 2 look at each other during a flypast.

The briefing screen also acted as a rather rudimentary lobby. Players could arrive and choose their flight roles, aircraft and paint job, and then wait for the server to fill. Once two or more players had arrived and selected their aircraft and were ready to sortie, a countdown timer would start and automatically trigger the mission so they weren't waiting around for ever. A lone player, waiting on the server on their own could start the mission with Ai wingmen, and future arriving players could drop in and drop out as replacement, as explained above.

One of the things which had proven to be an issue with the networking was briefing. Sending huge amounts of text over a client connection seems like rather a bad thing and I have been desperate not to abuse seven shades out of the commandToClient. This is the reason that I haven't got a large and indepth mission briefing description working yet. I am considering creating it as a seperate GUI file and sending that directly to the player in the same way mission download should work. I do however have a quick description of mission objectives created, pulling them directly out of the mission file.

Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics

 The post mission debriefing screen lists all the statistics that pertain to the player. All allied aircraft are listed as well as their victories, recorded as kills and assists, and their final state which descibes their damage. Added to this is the individual client's performance which ... when I iron out the bugs ... will list the types of kills and assists they scored as well as how accurate they were with their weapons. Right now ... it's a tad buggy ...

More Lies And Bugs Than Statistics ...

Here's a video of the old way I selected playable flights with the multiple buttons at the beginning, and shows how the briefing screen works for aircraft and paint scheme choice.

And so that was the month that was. August, it was wet and cold and not much of an end to summer. The summer fan is dismantled and stored for next year, and the Autumn duvet is already on the bed for maximum comfy.

Events Dear Boy, Events

 So this month I have been coding a "Mission Events System" loosely based on how Descent: Freespace did it.

Chief amongst this creating a system that read all of the spawnPoint data which held all the info for various events, and anything inside the mission's own custom event file, then tried to organize all of that into something which wasn't gibberish.

I can give you a quick rundown ...

   //this is where the mission relevant data is started
   //all missions related events are controlled from here
   //before we spawn the player we need to load the MissionEventFile (MEF) and all it's functions
   //to do this we need to find out how many players we have
   //treat this number as 1 for single player game and start the mission with the first client joining
   //MissionEventFile holds the missionEventList (arrayObject) and all mission event functions
   //spawnPoints inside the missionEvents folder are for spawning and events
      //spawnStart;
         //1 timed or immediate spawn from player arrival; 1 = spawn immediately
      //spawnNear;
         //object that we should spawn near, if spawnDistance > 0; this overrides our spawnPoint location; defaults to player
      //spawnDistance;
         //distance from spawnNear object in kilometers;
      //dataBlock; <<<<< spawnDatablock
         //literally datablock name for player; eg: F11Goshawk, etc. Never AiF11Goshawk though, Ai gets added later
      //dataType; <<<<< spawnClass
         //type of datablock; eg: aeronautVehicle, etc. Never AiAeronautVehicle though, Ai gets added later
      //startingThrust;
         //starting engine setting as F32, default 0.6
      //team;
         //0 greenFor(neutral); 1 blueFor(ally); 2 redFor(enemy); 3 yellowFor(aggressor);
      //skillLevel;
         //Ai skillLevel 1-10; modified with difficulty
      //callsign;
         //name for vehicle or wing of aircraft based on wingNum and isWing number;
         //eg: solitary isWing0 "bob"
         //eg: isWing 2, wingNum 3 "bob3_2"
      //isWing;
         //0 = no not a wing only 1 vehicle or was a wing which has already been reduced to 0
         //1+ = is a wing, this number goes down everytime the wing is destroyed
         //wings respawn with wingDelayMin/Max time when reduced to wingMin number of remaining aircraft
         //a new arrayObject is created for the wing and all aircraft are added to this from that wing
         //eg: callsign "bob", arrayObject "bob_wing"
      //wingNum;
         //number of aircraft in the wing
      //spawnedNum;
         //number of the aircraft spawned in a wing, ++ until > wingNum then back to 1; this is set by scripts not editor
      //wingDelayMin;
         //minimum number in seconds for the wing to wait before spawning another wing and reducing isWing value by 1
      //wingDelayMax;
         //maximum number in seconds for the wing to wait before spawning another wing and reducing isWing value by 1
      //wingMin;
         //number of surviving aircraft when a new wing will spawn with wingDelayMin/Max. Default is 0, but best set to 1;
      //mainTask;
         //mainTask; 0 do waypoints; 1 dogfight anything; 2 strike target; 3 escort;
      //mainTaskTgt;
         //object for mainTask, can be vehicle, arrayObject list of targets, waypoint or path
      //eventTrigger#;
         //type of event to happen
            //onArrive - has spawned
            //onDepart - has departed
            //onDamagePercent - damage has gone below threshold
            //onDestroyed - uses callback onDisabled and onDestroyed for second check
            //onWaypoint - has moved to waypoint position
            //onPathComplete - has completed the total path
      //eventObject#;
         //object id; eg: onWaypoint = waypoint id; default blank/0/"" is spawnDatablock's object
      //eventDelay#;
         //delay in seconds from the eventTrigger# being completed
      //eventResult#;
         //result of the eventTrigger# occuring
            //script name; function to be activated from missionEventFile (MEF)
      //eventTarget#;
         //target of the event to do something, specifically used for spawn;
         //if no target then it should refer to a local wing or aircraft
         //eg: scorpio wing now spawns in 10 seconds due to eventTrigger1 "onWaypoint", eventObject1 "player", eventResult1 "spawn", eventDelay1 10, eventTarget1 scorpio wing

So that's my own comment notes in the file, though some of that has since been changed ... probably.

Part of this is "wings"; groups of aircraft that spawn together and can respawn in "waves" when their number has been depleted to a certain amount.

Contextual Messaging about Events in the top left

And what are events without victory and defeat conditions? Not very interesting that's what.

Events - hurray you didn't bugger it all up!

So with all of this in place it was time to create something which looked like a proper game mission. And here it is!

Here's a quick overview of what happens:

• Victory Condition: All enemy are destroyed
• Failure Condition: All allied reinforcements are destroyed
  
• Player Spawns Event
• First enemy wing SCORPIO spawns with a delay in response
• Enemy wing SCORPIO is destroyed
• Allied wing of reinforcements spawn in response to SCORPIO onDestroyed
• Enemy wing LIBRA spawns after delay of reinforcements arriving. Also enemy wing TAURUS spawns with an even longer delay, near reinforcements.
• After losing 3 out of 4 reinforcements I go and help out the last one before completing the mission.

In this playthrough the reinforcements were not very effective and got pounced on early by the enemy fighters, in other tests they accounted for some kills and assists.

When the mission is over status of all aircarft is printed to the console, detailing kills, assists, damage and the such. Eventually this will be part of a debriefing screen.

So that is the month that was. Roll on July.

One Spell Pony Says Explosion

 This month I have mostly been dealing with explosions.

And vapour trails and general special effect type stuff.

And I found out that the PBR I had been using had broken metalness which was fixed on a newer engine version, so I had to redo all my PBR maps again, after having to redo all my PBR maps again last month because I had Occlusion and Roughness in the wrong RGB channels ... but back to those explosions.

Right back at the beginning of Unnamed Victoriana South China Seas Dieselpunk Dogfighter I created a system of damaging individual aircraft parts, thus degrading performance related attributes like turning, speed, etc. Now I neeeded to actually make it look like something was happening when this actually happened. I threw in a small explosion with a nice little puff of dark smoke to let everyone see that a damage limit had been reached. When this happened a mesh element would be swapped for a more damaged version so that the player could visibly see their aircraft being steadily shot to pieces.

Here is test to show all the parts of an aircraft that can get blow clean off

 I came up with a somewhat hacky solution of hiding the destroyed area and then spawning the blown off part of that area as a static object, so that I could use the same skin texture as the aircraft and give it a spnning animation, and mount that onto a projectile that was gravity heavy.

And of course if an aircraft takes way too much damage all over rather than having a single part get blown off, it just explodes. Whilst some of the debris is made up of model meshes, most is in fact animated sprites for small metal plates tumbling through the air.

Explosion!

I also made some Dazzle Camouflage skins for the three aircraft types I had previously modeled.

Dazzle Camo; The Rule Of Cool

This brings us to actually sorting out some sort of gameplay mission, and for that I started working on an Event System. I have been thinking of taking a cue from the old space shooter Freespace and FRED, FReepace EDitor, as to how missions are put together. It had a drop down editor for logical arguements which acted as cues for events, thus preventing someone from filling it with absolute gibberish. The premise is quite simple, if x happens do y. Most of this is about spawning new waves of enemies or ships as well as keeping a general tab on mission objectives.

I have come up with a system based on using scriptObjects in the mission for each aircraft or ship or active thingy, all stored in a named folder in the mission editor for ease of finding, which then accumulate to an array on the load game event, waiting for the events to be checked against array list and ticked off one by one. 

The idea is that something occurs - eg1: player connects - the Event System looks to see if anything else needs to be done - eg1: enemy aircraft wing spawn 15 seconds later.

eg2: Enemy are down to 25% numbers, second enemy wing spawns.

eg3: Second enemy wing is destroyed, large enemy formation arrives. Timer starts for player to survive for 120 seconds.

eg4: 120 seconds later, allied wing of reinforcements arrives.

eg5: All enemy destroyed, mission accompished.

And so on and such forth. Minus timers the Event List is entirely passive and is just checked against when something happens that was stored in the array from the aircraft scriptObjects in the editor. This seems to be the best result for low overhead.

So, that was the month that was, and next month we will hopefully have a fully working Event System and actual playable mission which I intend to be a homage based on the first mission of Freespace: The Great War.

Backbone Required

 So I've gone and FUBARed my lower back.

Current state of development ...

Hilariously this was caused, not by the hike I went on to do some deliveries and check on the welfare of vulnerable people, but by the innocuous action of stepping out of the shower afterwards ...

Least painful position right now ...

This has somewhat stalled progress due to sitting be the most painful position to be in and lying down - away from my PC - being the least painful.

This has led to watching lot's of train cab rides, mostly from Japan, which has some really pretty scenery.

Previous to incapacitating myself, I had continued to work on dogfighter game. I had detailed various datablocks of different fighters and set the AI pilots to slug it out in numerous tests. I had also finally added the player into the mix, allowing myself to take to the skies as one of Blue Team and take on the dastardly foes of Red Team, with each team comprising of a mix of aircraft types - though currently all using the same placeholder model for the time being.

Location damage GUI was broken here

I had also added a couple of different radar resources, one standard top down and the other the 3D style radar from Elite. I found the 3D style to be somewhat confusing and so removed it and stuck with the more simple top down radar. I added toggleable ranges and made sure that different teams displayed in different colours.

Top left overhead radar and below the more confusing 3D version

The one I settled on

I also changed how the aircraft classes handle so that they are obviously more different. Fighters now lose a lot of speed when turning, whilst interceptors lose their maneuverability when gaining speed, and strike aircraft are somewhat midway between the two.

I improved high G stall turns for the player, so if you get them right you can swing the aircraft round quickly, and if you get them wrong you'll stall - hence "high G stall turn".

Basic combat stats for a mission are now stored with assists, kills, shots and hits being recorded for the player. I decided to use the same system as one of the game which inspired this project which was the old space dogfighter Descent Freespace: The Great War.

The one IP Volition has no intention of ever bringing back :(

I made a few other changes, tweaks and improvements here and there, like stopping the Ai from spawning above their aircraft ceiling limits which immediately threw them into a death spin dive.

So next month I think it will be time to actually model some custom aircraft and start to deal with physically showing damage to individual vehicle parts such as having the wings shot off and the such like.

Also probably a good idea to do some exercises to strengthen the lower back when I am able to get up and down from the crapper without needing to lean on two crutches ...

Until then, time to lie in a more comfortable position and watching the Hiroshima to Fukuen line whilst the pain killers kick in ...

Space Year 2021: Stage 1 of 12 Complete! Dogfight!

It's the futuristic space year of 2021 AD, stage 1 (January) of 12 (the Annum) has been completed ... though you might be forgiven for not noticing ... 

Having previously worked out my issues with Ai pilots taking a leading aim on a moving target I have spent all of January getting them to actually dogfight one another. Choose target, go fast to get into shooting range, slow down to follow it and blow it out of the sky. Took a bit of doing but worked nicely. 

Next up was creating a system of evading when an AI came under attack rather than just sit there and get shot at. Reading through vast tomes of air combat and aerobatics, I managed to come away with ten meaningful emergency maneuvers to try and shake an enemy fighter, and added a barrel roll if none of the others seemed to be an oppropriate match for the defenders circumstances.

 That's not a barrel roll (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

This brought some problems itself, that in high-G maneuvers such as a Stall Turn, the Ai had a nasty habit of losing all energy and ... well, stalling ... a lot.

He's written his Artificial Intelligence Pilot Engine Management System? Stall it.

So then I embarked on a complete rewrite of how my Ai would use engine management. Previously it had been a simple case of setting engine percentage with a nose attitude modifier, now it was all about maintaining the desired speed. This massively reduced stalling in tight turns but not completely eradicated. So I added an anti-stall system that would force the Ai to move to a desired rate of knots should their airspeed drop at a rate that would bring them within the losing height at level flight, with a nose attitude modifier. I reused the anti-stall method which I had written for spawning aircraft and getting them up to their starting speed immediately. The maths required a bit of evening out for an object that already had velocity in 3 dimensions and initial attempts had some supersonic thrust propelling the vehicle across the sky like Warp Factor 9 but I ironed these out eventually.

Unedited video of an 8x8 dogfight

Coupled with all of this was the the obvious need for collision avoidance, both from other aircraft and the ground and max ceiling which each aircraft type can go up to before the engine is starved of oxygen and stalls. Dynamic collision avoidance of other moving objects was somewhat of a pain in the maths but I got there eventually with very little happening in the way of head-on collisions during mass heda-on attacks at each other team's formations.

32 aircraft head on attack - no collisions just 2 shot down

64 aircraft battle moments after the first pass, and why it's called a dogfight I guess

In other news I decided to update the banners on my youtube account, and give them some new artwork. Here I discovered that it doesn't actually let you reposition your artwork and keep scale after upload, so had to edit the image to fit into their stock measurements and orientation.

I also spent quite a bit of time viewing train stations webcams on a spare monitor whilst I worked for maximum comfy.

Everywhere seemed to be getting snow ... except me, it just rained here. (๑′°︿°๑)

So, that was January, Year of The Koof Part Deux, pubs are still shut then ... Join me again in next months exciting episode of "why is maths hard?"

Damageable Areas And Wonky Maths

 I had been coding an external camera. Move it horizontally and it would extend out and wrap around so you could view all the way from the front. Vertical worked in the same manner except it stopped directly above or below so the whole scene didn't appear upside down. Then I merged the two together and everything kind of broke. In retrospect this probably due to me fixating over the Y value of the movement  of the camera whilst ignoring both the mvoement distance and actual camera rotation. This appears to have led it to wander off when both x and y values exceed 0.5f.

Having previously coded a hitbox solution for individual areas of the airframe, I had tied all of that together with damageable modifiers for how perfromance of the aircraft would deteriorate. Damaged wings reduce maneuverability, damaged engine losses speed and acceleration, etc, etc. I added a HUD element so that the player could visually see the state of the aircraft with a total airframe health bar for overall damage.

Aircraft systems on the lower right, radar to go lower left

There was a minor conundrum with weapons and their placement on the model. I was considering adding extra variables to weaponImage code so that a gun could fire from up to 3 seperate points from an aircraft with their own particle emitters and fx. In the end I simply added a gun to each of the relevant aresa and had them synchronize to fire alternatively.

Guns go brrrrrr ... and in order

I started to figure out AI and which tasks they should be concentrating on in some sort of order of importance. At the top of all of these is not stalling because falling out of the sky due to making a dumb maneuver at low speed would be considered bad and also rather embarrassing. I'm developing a skill system for AI pilots where lower skill will mean being more reactive and higher skills more proactive. This can be used for simple and obvious things like taking an aiming line ahead of a moving target, to how to respond to and evade an attacker, turning from the role of defender to aggressor, such as pulling up, rolling and reducing speed all together to get the opponent to fly past - and so we are back to not stalling.

Speaking of stalling, I have been contemplating adding a high-G turn or stall turn maneauver, where rapidly losing speed when decelerating boosts maneuverability - with the ever present danger of pushing it too far and stalling.

So next up, code some basic AI that can be able to perform a basic Combat Air Patrol, move to a location and circle that area, do some basic dogfighting with an opponent and the such like. Also need to code a radar. I have a few code examples from this, including the 3D style radar from Elite, but think that I will probably stick with a top-down type like Ace Combat 7.

Space Year 2020 And CO-OP Mode Works

The first month of Space Year 2020 is over. Which is kind of annoying as I always bemoan a month passing in the face of my meagre endeavours. However January has been rather productive.

I created muzzle flashes for the stock player character's weapons. Apparently there is a way to do this in Max using mesh visibility animations ... but Blender3D doesn't appear to have that so I had to fake it with the good old "make it really small and hide it inside the gun when not in use" approach.

 The gifts that keep on giving ... but not this much ...

I also went back and restructured a lot of the power ups. There is a rare power up which drops other temporary power ups - however I found this to be very overpowered, so I changed it to drop a small gift box which contains a 20 second buff to a single attribute - "buff" apparently being the correct terminology for this sort of thing. I also swapped a common single attack damage multiplier for a temporary damage booster that lasts 60 seconds.

The '80s called to remind everyone that it was the greatest decade in history ...

I also channelled my 1980s childhood for an Aliens themed range finder. This finds the nearest unopened swag parcel or node and informs the player of the distance. Originally I tried to get this information via the GUI itself before common sense prevailed that I should be getting it from the player object on the server and then send the result to the GUI so it was networkable.

 Me, myself and I ... and me again ...

Speaking of networkable, I finally tested 4 player co-op mode and it worked quite nicely ... until it all broke but then I fixed it and now it really does seem to work quite nicely. I created a little leader board so all the players can see how they did at the end of the level relative to each other. I had to rewrite how levels are loaded as my previous level loading was very much based around single player mode, but at least I have had the foresight to make all aspects of individual player progression networkable so has been no hitches in spawning clients in a new level with all their old swag.

I have made various other tweaks and additions too numerous to mention, though refractoring the difficulty curve was one. It now works much better in co-op and endless mode, when the player has finished the game but continues to replay through the original 10 levels.

One thing I finally got around to finishing was the model for the Terror Tower item, which creates a zone of protection that the player can hide in. It's a tower of gibbets with severed heads that scares monsters away.

Too Spooky - even for monsters!

After putting on half a stone over Christmas, all of which seemed to congregate in a band around my waist I went for a good 70 miles worth of hiking this month. I am still the same weight but the middle tyre has gone so I guess it's turned into muscle somewhere and now my leg really hurts. More hiking tomorrow but it's only 5 miles to a pub.

Anyhow, roll on 2020.