Sunday, May 28, 2017

Progress Update #16

Alright, so what have I been up to these last 2 weeks? Well I have been working on character hitboxes, more specifically trying to figure out how to export hitbox physics information from Blender into my game. So far I've made absolutely no progress on that front. What I think I'm probably going to do is actually hardcode it into the game for now just so I can get the other parts of my engine working and then try again later when I have fewer points of failure to deal with.

In other news, I discovered this game called Space Station 13 and I'm probably going to shamelessly steal things from it because it solves my problem of how to make my game fun during the alpha. Basically how it works is the game has rounds that last 1-2 hours. At the start of each round everyone gets a random character and job to role play as. During the round random Space Balls like events can occur that you try to survive though. Because of the large verity of things that can occur, no one really knows how a round is going to play out and as a result you end up with rather interesting stories being crated. By adding this as a gamemode to my game I can have a game that's fun to play sooner, the features that would be needed for said gamemode would also be needed for my final game, and I wouldn't have to worry about players getting attached to their characters or worlds because everything will just get reset at the end of the round anyway.

Well, that's it for this post, hopefully for the next one I'll  actually have a ragdoll in the game, which probably wouldn't be all that interesting to watch, but it'll be something.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Progress Update #15

Whoops, completely spaced making a post (that no one will ever read) yesterday. anyway, I have decided the next thing I'll work on for my game will be the animation system. I don't really know how this should work, so I'm kind of making it up as I go along. The first thing I want it to be able to do is ragdoll, I think after I achieve that single actor animations should be fairly simple to implement. But the problem I've run into is ragdoll is a physics based animation and with my physics system and my animation system separate, this would be difficult to achieve. After some thought I realized that physics is a form of animation and should probably be merged into the animation system. This has numerous advantages and will solve a lot of the problems I've been trying to work out and allow all my animations to have physics enabled. Although I've not quite figured out how to translate my animations into something the physics engine understands yet and I strongly suspect I'm going to wind up writing my own physics engine before this game is done.

In other news I'm currently putting the finishing touches on my best drawing yet and have found my old digital camera, so when it's done I intend to post a picture of it to Minds.