Many Many Things

Homegrown Pumpkins vs Big Pumpkin Corporation

Many things have happened this month, many, many things ... however I cannot remember most of them. Not the most auspicious start to the monthly devblog is it?

Monsters Loot Swag got another update on Steam.

Many of those many things are maths, and I'm certain non of them were helped by my filter coffee machine going the way of the dodo. Naturally it waited until it was a year out of warranty befoer it decided to pine for the fjords, but pine it did. The light was came on but nothing useful happened, a feeling which I can relate to.

The Median Between 2 Vectors

 I had spent a good week fighting maths, wondering why I was seemingly receiving a torrent of gibberish - when I realized that I had forgotten to normalize the first returning vector. Rookie mistake, but with that out of the way I suddenly found more of them, and some of those had been lying in my older code for some time ... like the one were the formula was clearly missing half of the maths that the code comment was describing. Needless to say, everything that ended up being based off this function was gibberish but I just hadn't noticed ...

Eventually I managed to get the AI to try and surround the player and attack from the sides. This still led to a lot of wild swinging of swords which meant rather a lot of whacking their own team mates. They do not fully envelop the player, but at least make a decent attempt at out numbering for multiple attack directions. I might end up making the combat a little like Sleeping Dogs, where the player is attacked in a quick but orderly manner rather than the current free for all. I speeded up the thought process of the AI after I made the test video below.

I've also hammered a good 200 hours of play in Kingdom Come Deliverance, which I bought some time ago. The graphics are nice, the forests really well made, the dialog is witty and the first person melee combat autistic and janky - but I have had a lot of fun as a Cuman bowman riding around on a horse and nailing arrows into folks.

It's that time of the year again!

I bought 2 supermarket pumpkins, as the homegrown variety didn't quite get big enough to scoop out. I got a kilo of vegetable flesh from each one, so 2 kilos for 3 quids worth of pumpkin, now bagged up and in the freezer ... where I found some bags of last year's pumpkin ...

Anyhow, here's the WORLD DEBT CLOCK - don't have nightmares!

February Is For Pumpkins and Witches

 

 February, the month of the year long associated with witches and pumpkins!

Yeah, no, okay it isn't ... but my latest update for the top-down swag-em-up waifu shooter Monsters Loot Swag features the first of the unlockable player characters, Pumpkin! 

*Crosses off cute witch from his list of weibo anime meme characters*

Pumpkin can be unlocked by getting the "Marathon" achievement, and her attributes are as follows:

PUMPKIN is a mix ranged, playable character with a long ranged standard attack and decent strength for knocking monsters out of the way. Her special attack is a very high damage strike to the enemy to her immediate front, whilst her evasion stuns all monsters within half the screen with a slap of her broomstick. Whilst her healing and enery recharging is somewhat low, this is made up for with her exceptionally high starting mobility.

Vital Statistics ... 38-26-34 *rimshot*

And here she is in video action.

Speaking of videos ... here's a few more.

I have been looking at updating my working game engine code to the latest release of free and Open Source Torque 3D, the version with the fancy PBR and 21st Century asset system which apparently all modern game engines consider to be a must have. 

I had also spent some time making demo code for a third person camera system that has movement input orientated in screenSpace - eg: input "left" makes the player move left along the screen. Most third person games like Elden Ring, GTA and Sleeping Dogs (which is the only one of those I've actually played), have this input-to-movement system. For years randos in the forums had asked for this type of camera based movement, and I coded it up in an afternoon. This differs importantly from the top-down system in Monsters Loot Swag, as the camera is still the property of the player object, rather than being a seperate entity that orbits the player and is beyond their immediate control. This did mean quite a bit of hacking away at the player's move function but I managed to leave in the original system for first person view.

After this I added a lock-on system, so that the camera would orientate to view a target whilst keeping the player in-frame and allowing the same screenSpace based movement input system. To test the correct rotational direction of the camera I gave the rotation speed a delay which makes it look kind of janky.

Both the third-person camera and the lock-on resources are up on the Torque3D forums, but do be aware that the lock-on code was written in a haze of sleep deprivation and the maths can be described as "fugly", the networking is good though 😅.

Next up is another unlockable character for my Early Access title on Steam, Monsters Loot Swag, and I may also start to write up some demo code for a melee based hack-and-slash game, which might use actual weapon hitbox detection rather than faking the whole thing with maths and raycasts.