Update 15: May 2nd – 15th

It feels like so long, yet so recent since the last time I typed one of these. Long because of all my semester finals, travelling, new living space, and new work schedule, but recent because I’ve accomplished barely anything since last time. In reality I’ve spent still nearly two-thirds of the usual time per week working on the game and I also can’t blame myself for not getting much done over finals, but the last two weeks have been extremely unfulfilling bugfix work that ended up generally much harder than they should have been.

Basically everything I set out to do was so hard that it took forever to fix (usually due to dumb mistakes, lack of familiarity, or obscure reasons) or so small that it’s not too notable anyways. Regardless, I shall list everything I did just to vent about it then formulate a plan for the next two weeks.

Venting

I’m gonna number these too just so I feel better.

1. Enemies calculate distance to the player better so they kind of avoid the player if they attempt to jump on the enemies. Not perfect, but even then, the player can be attacked while standing on them, and they’re feisty.
2. Fixed environmental colliders so you can’t just walk out of the map. Not really important but it needed to be done for the-
3. AGDG demo released, will refine to make public later on.
4. Added a STUPID effect where the player whirls to face whoever attacked them when blocking. Only affects them horizontally because EULARIAN MOVEMENTS are STUPID and splitting them between y-only was easy but rotating around the local x axis only to a degree dependent on distance to the lock-on target is literally not possible. This took the majority of week 1 this update and it’s embarrassing, I hate it. The effect isn’t even that useful, even if it feels nice. I’ll never need to re-use it. What a waste of time. Got the idea from Dishonored 2, though, which used it in a cool way.
5. I’m just gonna add another number to relate my frustration with the previous point, it really sucked.
6. Made some blocking animations for the knife. I haven’t implemented them and I stopped because they’re so low priority (this kind of shit can wait until “post-production”) but in another universe I’d like to polish them up and add them first.
7. Planned out a guard break so you can’t spam the shield block but haven’t implemented it yet. It’s gonna need a few animations and it didn’t fit the Spring Cleaning theme.
8. Added damage-source filtering for the Tribesman AI. This is good because they can then parry certain attacks, and the general damage-sorting for health can let later enemies ignore or take different types of damage depending on the weapon. This is what I wanted out of spring cleaning.
9. Moved all of the major hit-testing code out of the weapon classes. This cleans it up MASSIVELY because it lets the AI find out where they got hit and if they respond or not, which is just LOADS more separate. It just really satisfies my software designing instincts.
10. Fixed Pause stopping all the animations and ruining everything until you switch weapons. Should have done this ages ago.
11. Fixed Pause letting the player move and stuff. Nobody knew that before now, haha.
12. Fixed when you pause and then unpause again and the mouse is just roaming free, having fun until you click in the game. It now just appears and disappears when the menus are on and off, like a good boy.
13. Fixed FOV initialization for all weapons, where it was funky before. Basically each weapon has a specific weapon FOV (that I fear letting players manipulate) and they need to start off right.
14. Fixed issue where switching weapons while reloading rendered the rifle unusable.
15. Cleaned up code for rifle in order to make a reasonable reload-state-machine instead of boolean spaghetti.
16. Grouped up class parameters for all of my big scripts so that they’re actually readable in the inspector.
17. Cleaned my dekstop. It was so bad, I had stuff like halfway across the screen before it just got out of hand and dissolved away. Now it’s two columns exactly and almost all useful folders.
18. Cleared a bunch of warnings, but many remain – most of them are dumb multi-platform input stuff.
19. Added a “Current Weapon” tool in the player inspector editor to make switching them easier. Ended up researching custom editors in the process, which appeal to me greatly.
20. Added a visual cue for my slow-mo debugging tool, telling the time percentage in the top right.
21. Updated my Trello top-to-bottom to remove redundant and obsolete stuff. I still have so much to do, but now it’s reasonably organized.
22. Addressed the messy Collision Matrix for my project and hopefully optimized it totally without causing issues.
23. Fixed FOV issues caused when sprinting out of ironsights for the rifle.
24. FOV is now lerped between zoom levels when aiming. Looks kind of nice.
25. Fixed ragdolls. God what a mess. After like an hour of manual joint-tweaking torment I found the Unity Ragdoll Wizard, which I had no idea existed! I’d used manual joints the whole time! It sucked! I just ran my tribesman through the process and got a pretty good ragdoll but that led to two more bugs – one with hit detection and one with ragdolls disappearing. Hint: The important one got solved and the other one got shoved to a “Late Summer Cleaning” list.
26. Yeah I fixed the hit detection after like 1.5 hours of banging my head against my desk. It was obscure and I don’t want to talk about it, it happened like an hour ago.
27. Fixed issue where you couldn’t start reloading while aiming down sights.
28. Fixed issue where crouch attacks only attacked a single forward point.

And that’s it, jesus christ. Lining them out makes me feel more accomplished, but I still wanted to get so much more done.

To address another issue, last week I said I’d upgrade to Unity 2018.1 but I still haven’t looked into the shader issue. I’d really rather make progress than have a few fancier tools, so I’m not going to do that now, but I’ll try later when more people are used to the new update. We’ll see if I need it at all- as much as I’d like it.

Next Update

I’ve done a bit of long-term planning and formed a rough idea of when I want to step out of the tribesmen and finally into another enemy. I’ll be adding no small amount of important features to them, but soon – hopefully before the second week of June, I’ll be all satisfied with their content and can properly begin on the Birds. I’ve made a full plan of how I want to move through these phases, and I’m gonna finish off the tribesmen and melee combat, the next enemy, some environmental healing and naturalism experiments, then get right on into the next large hunk of the game with the modern FPS combat.

If this week sounds like a mess, that’s because it is and that’s because I’m a mess right now. If future me is reading this, I’m still pretty upset about these two weeks, but I hope that making this plan works out in the future. I’ll be working more over the summer too, so hopefully I can knock out Phase 1 by University’s beginning.

I’ve rambled enough. If twitter followers read this thing, sorry I haven’t updated much recently.

Until next time, cheers.