Howdy, its been a little bit. Over the past two weeks we got a bunch of small fixes done, but there wasn’t really anything significant to show or if there were a ton of small things done, there weren’t really good ways to show it.
Progress Report
GENERAL UPDATES
Dodging
The dodge ability was updated to allow each character to have their own dodge distance and duration. Before we thought it would be great to have a single dodge ability, and have everyone be equal for distance and time.
So then it turns out that was a really bad idea, because most of our characters are vastly different sizes. So uh, lets change that.
So now each character can have their own distances for rolling while not locked on, and dashing while locked on. Regardless of whether its a dash or a roll , you can customize the distance of the initial burst of speed for the dodge, and then the sliding to a stop that they do afterwards.
Jump Compression
I had a whole thing written here about how we fixed the jump compression that was really wonky and having people’s feet go through the floor anytime they landed, BUT it turns out what we thought was going to work, ended up making them do the opposite.
Now their feet hover instead, which is slightly better, but we’re gonna go back to the drawing board on this one.
Animation Blending
There was a small problem that we weren’t able to figure out for a while, where if you started or stopped walking, your characters legs would fly out in front of them for a split second.
This seemed really weird until we started looking into the jump compression stuff. Lo and behold, by default the character thought they were always sprinting. So anytime we start or stop walking, when they’re trying to figure out if they should blend into their idle animation, they started sprinting for a moment.
Not a huge bug, but one that did have us stumped for a while.
Orientation Blending
When you lock on to an enemy, your character plays new locomotion sets for walks and jogs. Typically we just had to make Forward, Left, Right, and Back. The animation system would blend these together to let you walk in the in-betweens, so diagonally in any direction.
The animations ended up not being able to blend very well if you switched your overall direction from forward to backwards. This would only happen if you’re walking forwards-right/left and switch to backwards-right/left. Going from forwards straight to backwards was fine. Its mainly visible if you’re locked on and moving around an enemy. As we should do, because the enemies are tall and imposing.
So the solution here was to add two more animations ( two for walk and two for jog), that are front-facing. The standard Left and Right animations basically assumed that you were walking backwards before, so that made it impossible to blend nicely from the front.
Its more animations for each character, but it does help them look a bit less jarring when changing directions.
SHOLD UPDATES
Shold got a new IK Rig that let us begin porting over all of his old animations.
This gets us 90% of the way with his animations, except that it didn’t quite fix up everything it should have.
Truly a tribute to the strength of his sheer will to destroy his enemies.
This means we get to go ahead and fix this manually for 290 animations. Yay.
FIA UPDATES
Model Updates
Fia had some skinning issues where her shirt was clipping through the decorative neck brace and the brace wasn’t staying intact when her head moved.
That was stopping us from moving her head and neck at all during any animation, so it was a good time to fix it.
Added in Fia’s dagger as well, so she can stop using the default ritual dagger.
That Dagger looks as long as a sword
Shhhhhh
Completely ignoring the fact that I like to oversize all weapons, its important for weapons to be a bit longer than you’d typically expect, to make sure they they actually have a chance to hit the enemies.
Even the hitboxes for them are oversized to an extent, to make sure that it hits when you expect it to, instead of missing by an inch or two and feeling like you got cheated.
Animation Updates
Oh baby, we finally have some custom animations for Fia. Started things off with new locomotion animations for walks, jogs, sprints, jumps, and turn in place. She finally animates differently than the initiate.
In addition, got her melee attacks finished as well. Typically characters have somewhere between 3-4 attacks for their melee combo, but Fia is all about attacking as much as she can to lower the cast time on her spells. More hits = faster spell casts, so uh, I gave her 11 attacks.
The Initiate has 4 attacks, Dawksin has 7, and now Fia has the most. Still might need to play around with this number, and possibly the timings, but it feels pretty good at the moment.
Wait, can you even chain that many hits in a row without getting interrupted?
I highly doubt it, but wouldn’t it be cool?
Look, the important thing here, is that I got excited about making attacks and they’re already done. Relax.
Also since she’s meant to be really flashy in combat, she does knife flips all the time. This was actually a bit challenging , since each animation had to know the orientation of the knife from the previous one, but I think it came out pretty neat and it helps sell her persona.
Still have to work on her heavy attacks and whatnot, but that should be done pretty quick. Next update shouldn’t be delayed.
See ya’ll next week.