Terrors Of Retopology Part Two

New UNLOCKABLE Character: Introducing POLARIS

 Monsters Loot Swag got a new update on Steam, this time featuring a new playable character named Polaris, who is a close range, melee based character with a pechant for saying; "Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru".

 Polaris utilizes the cleaned up auto-repology I created last month, with the character weighing in at around 8K tris, with a lower LOD of 4K - down from the standard 12-16K of the other characters. However that did get my thinking that I could probably make a perfectly decent lower poly base mesh with some decent deformation at the joint from scratch.

Base female mesh created from scratch with 8 face limb edge-loops

This weighed in at a mere 3K triangles and had fully working fingers, something I had not really bothered with in the previous character models. I had started off by deciding to have limbs with edge-loops of 8 faces and built it from there, using the silhouette of my previous base character, which was a chunky 20K tris. After creating this first LOD, I made another from scratch, this time basing the limb edge-loops on 6 faces, which weighed in at ~2K tris, including fingers and some other details which probably be removed for an in-game model.

2K tris LOD with 6 face limb edge-loops

After this I decided to make a base male character model using the same technique, something which I could plan my next game project with.

Next game project base male mesh idea

With that done I wanted to have another attempt at animation using rotoscoping. This would probably work best with multiple cameras, but I could only rustle up one working camera for a side view, so had to ad-lib for a facing angle. Initially it looked a bit wonky due to lack of space and cutting my own feet out of view, but when it eventually stopped raining for 5 minutes, I could go outside and refilm myself acting out some movements.

Rotoscoped Animation

And behold the end result was not too bad. The downside is that without exaggerating some foot movements, it tended to look like the back foot was getting dragged and just blending to position, but then the exaggerated movement looks a bit twichy. Either way, bottom dollar motion capture is perfectly feasible, and I may go looking for a second old camera, so I can get a front-on view as well as the side angle, which would help bone positioning in the other viewport. I don't think it's neccessary to glue ping-pong balls all over myself whilst doing this, but maybe not wear baggy trousers next time - but hey, Gen-X here, we even had a song about them.

The next game project is going to be the hack-and-slash concept I've had for a while, and whilst I would like to do another ridiculously giant project with an RPG, I have decided on a more contracted gameloop idea. I was tempted to make it a side-scrolling arcade style slasher, but have gone back to my original free-cam idea, were the player can rotate the camera view as they please.

In other news I was clearly too optimistic about the weather and whilst the Spring duvet remains, I quickly ditched the Summer pyjamas and went back to the Winter fluffy jimjams. It has been bloody freezing, but hopefully this will change. Fingers crossed for May.

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.