Classic RPG Inventory For Classic RPG Attributes

 A little difficult to have a game that heavily features looting - without having an inventory to buy, sell, upgrade and equip that loot! So the last month has been mostly spent making an interactive inventory system.

The system is fairly simple, sell loot at campfires for XP, then upgrade your stats so that you can equip and wear better combinations of the weapons and armour that you have looted!

The game features a rather classic RPG attributes system of STR, DEX, CON, etc as well as two career paths, of High Knight Noble and Low Knight Errant, which increase the player's wearable AP stat. The High Path costs more XP whilst increasing Rage Bar buffs - when critical strikes in battle negate enemy defence and massively increase damage - whilst the Low Path allows for quicker AP increases for far less Rage buffing. No more running about in your underpants once you unlock an armour type.

STR and DEX stats allow ever increasing weapon equipment, whilst CON is HP and STA allows for more sprinting, dodging, jumping, and heavy attacks. There is also ATH(letics) for faster running and further jumping and dodging. All very classic RPG style statistics and behaviours that any gamer (video or tabletop) would recognize - to the extent that I've only used the 3 letter abbreviations for the names (except ATHlectics which could equally be called AGIlity).

Whilst I might keep saying "simple" in this blogpost, actually getting the inventory working was a huge mix of trial and error (especially with gamepad only usage) and took the whole month of development.

And here it is in video action!

 With the player now able to loot and gain XP from it, and spend that XP to enhance and equip their character, the next big development milestone is to allow interaction with the NPC warbands. Whilst the various factions happily play the game all by themselves that is not particularly interesting for the squidgy humanoid sat behind the screen - so next up is making friends and enemies of the roaming NPC raiders! And after that, it's sorting out a page on the Steam Store for early access release! (which looks like it will be after the summer sale with the vetting time).

Wearables

How it started

How it's going

Wearables are a thing. Technically we always had wearables ... but it was just a box that fitted on the head, now we have an array of helmets and various armour types.

And needless to say, all of these variations have ended up causing problems themselves ...

After making vast quantities of helmets, helmet variations for differing warbands, I discovered that mesh reskin was borked. Everytime I set a new skin on the mesh ... other skins would reset. After going through the shapeInstance code, I finally got it to agree with me that it didn't need to reset to base skin for all other meshes ... except it still did ... and this is when printf comes into play.

 And it was a lot of printf, but it did let me back-trace through the code to discover the well of embuggeration that was causing the issue ... the shapeInstance appeared to be reinstanced when changing the skin. I must admit, I was not expecting to recreate the human DNA sequence from scratch every time I wanted to change into clean underpants ...

This threw a somewhat annoying spanner of arseholeness into my previously anticipated slick engineering. The main annoyance of course being that I had already made a huge number of helmet materials base on reskinning, but now I had to save the reskinning function for a singular mesh, which would naturally be the main armoured body.

So a minor annoyance in the end, as I would be fearful of breaking MANY THINGS if I tried to change how the meshInstancing code worked. I can still use reskin for the main body, but headgear will now have to be individually exported, and I think the variations of colour schemes for cloth aventails and coifs will have to be reduced somewhat.

Did I mention lots of helmets? Well here they are ... prior to me discovering the resking instancing issue.

Saxons

Norse

 

Lombards but could be the Franks

Avars

 

Normans

 

KievRus

Magyars

 

Now obviously not everybody is going to start off in their love heart patterned boxer shorts ... well, except the player who actually is. The Ai warbands are obviously going to start off equipped with their customized armour meshes, all based on rank and faction.

As I have started off with the first half of the warbands, chronologically there are more to come in time periods up to around the 16th Century ... when war gets really boring due to the preponderonce of boomsticks. The current warband factions do not much get passed the 12th Century, so armour is somewhat reduced to the primaries of cloth, chain and lamellar. Technically there is some brigandine in their but only as a defence class rating for superior helmets, so now I'm just getting pedantic. And who doesn't like to get pedantic? I mean why would you even bother with doing indie game dev if you weren't pedantic? It would take all the suffering fun out of it.

Assert dominance over the battlefield by T-posing, it is sure to crush the enemy's fighting spirit

 I had also started to update my Collada format mesh files to FBX. Collada has always worked nicely but it's support is no longer being updated (thanks Sony), so changing to FBX seemed like the logical solution ... except that I had some errors with animations, like baffling errors, like it insisting on contracting the whole animation into the reduced key frames which it I had set, so that's going to require some more testing.

But, in the meantime, here's a video of wearables in action - cue Sabaton. 

 So, next up, is updating my wearable code to remove the skinning references to the helmets and use pre-exported headgear variants, and leave reskinning just for the main body armour meshes. Some sort of special effects for combat, most noteably sound and particles would certainly help too, and then it should be on to making a gameplay world which isn't a flat grey box.

 October is here.