More Third Person Melee Mayhem

Finally, summer has arrived in the dreary part of grim northern climes, though July started as June ended, with weather best described as "crap", and a sudden return to wearing jumpers.

Game development-wise things have continued much as before, with the vast majority of effort being aimed at the third person melee project demo.

I had long wondered what the best way of getting different clothing and armours onto a model would be. Many moons ago there was a turn-based RPG there was a post-apocalyptic neo-Roman game ... who's name escapes me ... and they literally had to load every piece of armour that the player could wear onto a single model and use the "hide/unhide" commands. 

Well many moons on from this and it looks like the only way to accomplish such things appears to be in the same manner, as you cannot just mount meshes and have them conform to the character's skeleton and mesh weight painting. Deciding that making a single model with EVERY PIECE OF CLOTHING that could ever be considered was not a great method for potential later updates, I delved into the engine to see how best this could be accomplished with code and script. The answer was to add a list of meshes to the character model's constructor, though this did mean it all had to be done at preload and was thus impossible on the fly, so once again, we are back to "hide/unhide" commands. However, at least this way it could be automated to search for all available meshes (and their LODs, which have to be added seperately per mesh), rather than sticking it all in the model and never being able to change it later.

Behold The Hat Of The Ages!

The Shape Constuctor code for adding meshes was somewhat out of date and relied on directory locations, so I updated it to deal with the engine's asset system. I'm thinking it would be best to have a function look for all relevant assets - probably from a folder naming system - and then add them all at runtime preload to the character mesh, followed by immediately hiding the added meshes and then only displaying them on the model when specifically called for; eg: when the player slects clothing or armour. I am not currently certain what the limitations on numbers of meshes would be this way.

Orientated Box Outline In WorldSpace

 Speaking of coding, it took long enough to get my custom code and the debug drawer to agree exactly how an oriented box works in world space. I had an idea for testing for blocking and parrying by using the actual strike/bounds box of an object, except weapons are not actually objects at all but are virtual due to the FSM system. After some testing I decided it was going to be difficult enough to make a successful parry this way and will probably go down the Dark Souls route of using animation frame timings - though unlike Elden Ring, I very much want to avoid this being tested on the client side as that appears to highly exploitable to hacks.

 Whilst I had coded a lock-on target system a few years earlier, in practise at melee attacks it was not always easy to actually strike the target, regardless of it being screen centre, and quite often I could miss and my strikes would go just wide. I decided to code a toggleable "face target" system, thus allowing the player to decide whether they wanted to absolutely aim for the enemy at the loss of movement speed due to circling side to side or backing away.

This worked fine but seeing the player spin in place to face the opponent seemed very 20 years ago, so I went back into the animation system and coded a speeded up sidestep when doing it.

Artifacting gif is artifacting ...

Whilst adding things to the lock-on system, I thought it might help to distinguish which target it was by having a health or status icon. I started off with a health bar over the target that reduced in size the further away, eventual throwing the lock-on off if the target was too far away. After this I thought I might create a central lock-on icon, for instance Elden Ring has a tiny white dot at the centerpoint of the target. I found this and the opponent health bar to be a little too busy on screen, so made the central icon a circle which changed colour depending on the target's health.

Whilst testing lock-on I discovered an issue with my original code from a few years back, I had always tested it with the player moving around the target, but not the target moving. This turned out to cause some nasty jitter due to the client being a tick behind the server. Rather than mess around in the depths of prediction I just took some old "target heading and velocity aimpoint" code from my old Aeronauticals air combat demo, and retrofitted it to have the client look 0.064 ahead, 1 server tick and 1 extra tick for the client being an engine tick behind. I added this code to my resource on the Torque3D website and slightly rewrote some of the original lock-on code to make sure that everything was using the render transforms that the client was seeing rather than the actual server positions of objects, something which I had previously noted in code about displaying names above objects whilst looking into coding the health bar for the target.

In other news some muppet crashed half the world's computers and offered discount pizza as way of apology. It turned out at some point other computer systems had been updated too, and Monsters Loot Swag no longer worked on Linux due to changes with Wine and so the DirectX driver needed updating ... but apparently no one mentions these things and you just have to use The Force to find out. Turns out there was a slightly larger D3dCompiler47.dll which needed to replace the slightly smaller one. Monsters Loot Swag now once more works on SteamDeck.

And that was pretty much July, numerous other things happened which I cannot remember, I got a tan when summer eventually arrived because you just don't know when the free vitamin D is going to disappear around here. After months of drowning in a seemingly perpetual deluge of rain, I am back to hoping for some wet stuff coming out of the sky as my water barrels are empty and the veg patch is parched.

Next month is the 10th anniversary of Airship Dragoon being on Steam. I thought about maybe doing "something" but the models were all exported using a system which doesn't exist anymore (pre-Collada), so anything new would not be compatible with older animations ... which is a bit of a bummer. The past is a foreign place where they do things differently ... so I think I will just let sleeping dogs lie on that one.

Melee Working Redux

 

Last Month's Blender Animations Are This Month's Game Animations

I cleaned up my dev folder system, mostly because it had no particular system at all, and was just a mess of folders dumped into a single directory. Over the years this had grown to a somewhat considerable number of test builds, most of which were pointless duplications. Tidy all of this up into a few folders based on simple concepts such as "Game Builds", "Test Builds", "Modules", etc has made everything a lot easier to find.

The only casualty to all of this was the deletion of my Melee Build Test Area, which I had thought was just another test area, however it included some more up to date melee code than the named Melee Project. However it was not particularly advanced so came as no great loss, and whilst redoing the now deleted extra pieces, I actually improved them.

I imported my previously rotoscoped animations into the game engine, and set up a character to use them. With a bit of tinkering all worked as intended, though I have since edited the standard run animation as it contained quite a sharp hip flick which in turn sent the character's butt cheeks into rather a frenzy. This has since been toned down.

Next up was to reinstate hitBoxes to the character limbs. Unfortunately some of the bones rotations had developed a nasty roll , which sent the hitBoxes for the legs into a strange position and so I proceeded to fix this, and annoyingly all the animations which I had previously made had to be redone. Thankfully it was only the legs which needed retuning.

From Hell's Heart I Give You A Good Pokey-Pokey!

HitBox testing worked well, and I even changed the code as to how strikes work. When I had first written the melee code last year, I had for some reason had great trouble trying to get a box mounted on the weapon to use as a strikeBox against the target's hitBoxes, and had in the end settled for an armature bone system to measure between the bones for the length of the attack. 

I say "for some reason" because it all seemed quite straightforward now to set up a box on the weapon for collision, get it's measurement and offset from the handle/mounting point. So the hacky bone node system was retired in favour of the collision box size and offset being automatically stored on datablock preloading. And if there is no box to provide collision for the weapon, it will fallback to using the bounds box and work out it's offset from the mountPoint. So, not sure why all of this proved hugely difficult last year, but I expect "tunnel vision" which seems to happen quite a bit in game development.

The Cold Steel! They Don't Like It Up 'Em!

Expanding the original melee code, which already had a fatigue and rage system, I added stagger depending on how much damage the target had taken versus how much they had remaining. Stagger breaks the target's attack and defence, potentially leaving them open for a free strike. The lower the target's HP, the more they will stagger.

It took a bit of trial and error to prevent the code getting stuck in certain animations, but after a while I ironed out all the obvious bugs. I also rewrote how falling damage works, introducing a plummet system were the player just drops face first, and if damage on impact is high enough a custom plummetDeathAnim plays.

Elden Ring Style Stat Bar Reduction

The player Stat Bars on the GUI got an overhaul, when health or energy is lost the original level is now shown as a different colour and reduces until it meets the current Stat level, a bit like it does in Elden Ring (no I haven't played it, but I am aware it is a thing, and a thing with Stat Bars which do this).

The weapon FSM system got a whole overhaul, and light and heavy attacks now trigger in a way which does not require the player loop to count, freeing up a couple of write/read stream vars. A quick released attack button sets the FSM to interrupt the state and send a light attack var, whilst holding it allows the state to complete for a heavy attack.

There was probably a lot more "stuff" that got done, but I can't remember it all off the top of my head here.

Flaming June was more damp squib June for the second year running, and the strawberry patch appears to have already given up the ghost.

It's halfway through the year already which only goes to show how painfully slow game development is. 😩

Aurora Borealis And Prancing About For Rotoscoping

Chalmers: Yes, I should be--good lord, what is happening in there?!

Skinner: Aurora Borealis?

Chalmers: Ah- Aurora Borealis!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen!?

Skinner: Yes.

Chalmers: ...May I see it?

Skinner: ...No.

But see it I did and it was spectacular. Alas I was only armed with an unfamiliar camera and had no tripod set up so the pictures were dark and grainy.

Monsters Loot Swag got another update, available on Steam here.

Much of the month revolved around me being ill with some sort of random stomach issue which has resulted in a detox diet, which isn't as bad as it sounds, though caffine has been kicked into touch.

When not feeling like death, I have spent the month testing more of my rotoscoping concepts for animation, still with only one camera. There has been much prancing around the vegetable patch. Cue list of gifs.

Two-Handed Lunge - The Disembowlment Special!

Wide slash with chopping followup ... The Double Whammy!

Two Handed Sweeping Uppercut - They Won't Be Expecting That!

With various attack types done, both single and two handed strikes, I needed more video of myself prancing around like a demented elf for standard movements, such as forward, back, sides, etc. This was however postponed due to WEATHER and lots of it. It had bucketed down days, possibly weeks, it's hard to tell when you lose all sense of the Space-Time-Continuum due to being excessively soggy.

Whilst waiting for the biblical deluge to wash the sinners into the gutter, I added a shield to my hack-and-slash base character model. Whilst I had posed with my arm out, pretending to have a shield - bokken I can muster, Viking rond alas not - I had not been too aware of sword or body penetration. Thankfully my sense of spatial awareness was quite good, and changes and rotations were kept to an absolute minimum.

It did finally brighten up today, and so I spent more time running about on the way too small available area next to the veg patch. After a quick rotoscope I have some basic forward movement.

Tip-Toe, Through The Meanies ...

After some consideration on forearm and hand deformation I thought it was getting a little too mangled at the wrists, and so edited the base character model to include wristTwist bones, which proved to give much better deformation than twisting the forearm and hand along the Y axis.

Slash With Shield

Skewer With Shield

Reverse Cut With Shield

So that was a very wet May, hopefully it will fair up come June, though ... how the hell have we got to June already????