JLJac on October 14, 2014, 01:18:09 AM:

Outline is because of the re-sized screen, there occurs some kind of rounding error in the shader that makes that happen.

Yep, rain clouds grow as the rain approaches!

Update 337
Cleaned up some den stuff, including a bug where a lizard would believe it had access to a den despite that not being the case.

The afternoon I've spent working on the lizard tongue, if you remember? It's turning out pretty cool! But I'm not quite happy enough to show it just yet though. The basic functionality is in - lashing out, latching on to another creature, reeling it in. Also graphics are more or less there, I applied the triangle mesh code from the tail and am working on making the tongue a little bendy this time around, contrary to the straight line of the lingo version. Tomorrow I'm hoping to have some cool gifs of it!

JLJac on October 14, 2014, 07:41:55 PM:

Thanks Sorry man, music's covered!

Update 338

Lizard tongues!





That second one took sooo many takes  But it made me notice some details that needed fixing, so that was a plus!

As the white lizard is the most notorious tongue hunter, I implemented the white template in order to get some tongue behaviors in place. I've not done any graphical work on it what so ever though - as some of you might remember the white lizard is supposed to have a quite unique look too it - but here it's just like the others but with a white head. Don't look at that, look at the tounge

In the game it's just represented as a point lashing out, but the graphical module for the lizard improvises some rope physics-ish stuff on top of that, with the triangle mesh code from the tail. The tongue gets slimmer if stretched, and is allowed to curl up a bit when very relaxed. As it's spit out each point along it is given a slightly random vector, making it initially come out curled up as a package, to then later straighten out. I'm very happy with this effect, it looks "nature documentary" as James put it, and a little organic and weird. Good times!

What's worse is the actual gameplay implementation. Lizards are a bit less good at biting you now compared to the lingo build - they used to pretty much be "kill on touch", but now they have to have a more reasonable position to get a bite in. It seems that when dragging you in with the tongue, they generally don't tend to get that position in order, meaning that it's quite easy to get away in the time between the tongue releasing you and the jaws actually biting you - as you can see in the top gif.

I could make it so that they automatically get a grip of you if they've caught you with the tongue, but I like that you're not necessarily 100% doomed once they get you. It should be a serious situation though, so maybe they'll get a little bonus in their bite check right after releasing a tongue grip, or something similar. You shouldn't be able to count on getting away.

If they miss you and hit a wall, there's a chance they'll get stuck there, which looks kind of fun. Each frame has a certain random chance that they'll get loose again, so they could be there for no time at all, or quite a while.

The blue lizard also has a tongue, but much shorter and less effective. While the white lizard will stay still once it got you, and try to reel you in slowly, the blue lizard (which is not considerably heavier than you) will rather use the tongue to let itself be dragged after you, which is almost more annoying because it gives you less time to think. However, the blue lizard doesn't use the tongue quite as much, and will miss you most of the time it tries.

JLJac on October 14, 2014, 09:39:08 PM:

@Christian, oh yeah, that's true o_0 I'll move the connection slightly outward within the jaws so it doesn't show outside the head like that.

@DarkWanderer, the tounge is kind of weird, because in the game logic it actually only exists at its tip, so that one would be difficult. But the idea about having them bite each other and get into a fight is rad, totally implementing that one 

JLJac on October 15, 2014, 03:48:09 AM:

Thank you :D I'll do what I can to actually make it fun though 

Here's a somewhat precarious situation I found myself in when testing around:



Gives you some perspective on your own problems in life, no?

jamesprimate on October 15, 2014, 03:54:25 AM:

AHAHAHA

JLJac on October 15, 2014, 04:01:47 AM:

Hahahaha yeah, towards the end I just wanted to be eaten and get it over with, but I wasn't even granted that 

Actually they both have a "reel in" counter ticking, which is pretty slow (over the course of 10 seconds or something), so in the end the one latching on to me first would've gotten me.

It could definitely happen in-game, it pretty much did! There isn't really anything such as a solid "no win state", because the game engine is too floaty and unpredictable for something like that to be 100% decided. Something weird can always happen, where you're just sliiiightly out of the correct biting angle for the lizard or something like that. But a situation can definitely be really, really bad, such as this, hahaha!

JLJac on October 15, 2014, 04:32:08 AM:

Yeah, definitely! But one spear or rock would just break the deadlock though, and the deadlock is kind of what's keeping me alive here :S

jamesprimate on October 15, 2014, 10:35:52 PM:

getting world region stuff down to room-scale granularity. out of context these are utterly meaningless of course, but you would be shocked how many months of mental effort it took to get here

here are 3 of, like, 20:







I've been cryptically posting these on ello and now everyone seems to think im some sort of minimalist painter hahah

JLJac on October 16, 2014, 12:59:33 AM:

Look at this guy trying to pass for not being a visual artist... That's some harmonious compositions right there!

@DarkWanderer, yeah, I could very easily put up a system that keeps track of "annoyance" with other creatures, and as accidental damage happens between them those numbers would be incremented. The tracker would be hooked up to the utility comparer, and when the annoyance with another creature got too bad it'd flip to an aggressive behavior (given that there's nothing more important to do, such as fleeing). The attack would in turn cause annoyance in the other creature, and there'd be a fight! Weighting in how scary the other creature is definitely doable as well~

Update 339
Spears, spears, spears. A loooot of trigonometry going on today, with how the spears are supposed to get stuck in a certain angle, and then keep that angle as the creature is rotating.

Also, gluing one object to another in a way that didn't render them apart when moving at high velocities demanded a pretty deep dive in the game engine. What had to be done was separating updates of graphical modules, putting it after the game object updates, and also pass down a parameter to all objects so they could be asked by other objects whether or not they had been updated this frame. And a lot of other stuff, haha. But now one object can be glued to another, and it will stick snugly to the right coordinate even if everything is moving at a high velocity.

Further spear stuff completed today includes ability to stick spears in walls, and lizards having their spear-reflective heads implemented to much annoyance when play testing. Nailing lizards to walls is also in, I had fun this morning dodging around a courtyard as a poor white lizard sat impaled on a wall and tried to hit me with its tongue. What's new from the lingo version is the ability of spears to hit decorative body parts, such as the limbs or head in the case of the lizard. The spear doesn't really hit those parts, but the chunk they're attached to - but it gets it rotation and a bit of its placement from the decorative body part, making it look as if it's stuck there. With lizard legs I also implemented the disabling of limbs from a while ago when they get hit by spears - it looks pretty tragic, but also pretty cool.

The actual spears still look like red sticks though, so you'll get to see them later!

jamesprimate on October 16, 2014, 01:28:21 AM (Last Edit: October 16, 2014, 01:34:56 AM):

yep! that was in the lingo build even. were thinking of maybe taking it a bit further too and making them part of a (very) loose "level progression" mechanic thing, where perhaps spears are more of a scarce resource and you have to put some thought into how you use the ones you find: you find a spear. do you use it to try to get to new areas OR defend yourself against predators?

JLJac on October 16, 2014, 03:59:12 AM:

  I'm just having way too much fun with this 

jamesprimate on October 16, 2014, 08:58:45 AM:

oh wow, i reallllllly like the squiggly wiggle walk the blue does right after it first hits the ground! is it just the physics of it reorienting itself after it frees itself from the tongue? i wonder if that could be how the blue just walks in general, it has such a perfect creepy snake-like flow too it. SO COOL.

jamesprimate on October 16, 2014, 01:26:54 PM:

you recall in the lingo there were dotted lines and blinking arrows that illuminated when you were close to a shortcut, showing where it went? joar just hasnt gotten around to implementing that stuff yet or the "travel" animations.

that said, its still something we want to highlight and polish more in this version, but will prob take some thought and design work. weve even talked about this as recently as 2 days ago, but basically just "not there yet" etc etc

JLJac on October 17, 2014, 02:39:01 AM:

Actually there was a spitting lizard in the lingo build! So that's going back in! It wasn't sticky though, just pushed you around. But sticky would be way cooler! This is the red one though, the yellow one is the one hunting in packs.

Losing their tails... I think it would make them too much of a lizard, perhaps? They're a lizard-like... thing, not an actual reptilian.

James and I are hoping for bodies of water, for those exact reasons - it'd give some ways to control progress. I'm super particular about aesthetics though, so a graphically complex thing like water kind of depends on whether I'll be able to make it look good enough. I'd rather not have it than have it looking sub par compared to the rest of the game.

Actually I don't know what's going on in their heads at such detail... But yeah, they're constantly re-evaluating their targets, so they could easily do a shift like that.

Update 340
Yesterday I did all the fun stuff with spears, today I proceeded to get the boring stuff done! Such as having them disappear with creatures into short cuts, and then reappear (not duplicated!) and so on and so forth.

This in turn forced me to get to some other interesting stuff. I set up a "health state" class for creatures keeping track of their health, and what spears they have stuck in them (yes, I know this is macabre, but it has to be coded haha!). In order to keep track of what spear is where, I implemented an ID system, which also applies to creatures. It's really simple, every single object in the game (which is an actual interactive object, I don't label water drips and sparks) has a unique integer ID. This is accomplished really easily by having an integer in the main game class, and each time an object is created it asks to be assigned an ID, and the integer increases. No two objects will ever have the same ID! The upper limit for an int is more than two thousand million, so you'd have to eat a lot of bats for it to run out.

Unique ID's are cool for a few reasons! First of all, purely technical stuff, such as when spawning a spear, the game can look through a list of displaced spears "is this particular spear actually somewhere else" and if it's displaced, refrain from spawning it. That way object consistency can be created - one object exists in one place, and one place only.

But it's with creatures that the possibilities get really interesting! Just off the top of my head - relationships between individuals could be saved. "I'm very scared of creature #6911!" Or, and this one I know will make James happy, the ID can be used as a random seed for individual variations, cosmetic or behavioral. These would probably have to be pretty clearly communicated for them to be noticed, but they could be cool even if they're subtle, just knowing that the creatures are in fact individuals would perhaps making your interactions with them feel more personal.

Last for the day, I made a James friendly build so he can try out his level editor work! It seems to be running nicely, but some of the levels are not loading, so we'll have to troubleshoot that. All in all, a good week! Thanks for hanging around and talking, see you guys Monday!

JLJac on October 20, 2014, 04:41:41 AM:

Hahaha woooow! So many ideas! I do like the fungus idea, but it seems like that is a mechanic that should be a game itself, rather than something you slap on top of a finished concept. Haha and as Jimbert points out, Halo Did It! But if you had a game that was more focused on containing (or spreading) the contamination and built mechanics around that, it'd be really cool.

Update 341
Gggaaaaaaahhhhh shaaaaader heeeell revisited!

The coloration is obviously not the real deal (just gave it some colors that made it easy to see, won't use gradients when in the final look), but I'm happy with the surface movement and how it exists in the 3D-environment. The surface is a triangle mesh, so I'm hoping to be able to do some cool manipulations on it when stuff interact with it.



Here comes the funny part though - unity won't build with it (I use a screen coordinate passed down to the fragment shader, and that won't fly, apparently. There HAS to be some way around it though, they can't reasonably expect people to write fragment shaders without being able to ask about what pixel on the screen is being handled -___-). And even more funny, I wrote the entire thing imagining that it was snugly lined up to the level pixels, but when I resized the unity window - everything was suddenly fifty pixels to the left of where it should be! I had built it dependent on my unity window size... Well, the two problems are pretty much just one actually - getting screen coordinates (of the game area, not the goddamn Unity editor) and I feel pretty confident there has to be some solution for that. Hitting the forums tomorrow I guess, unless someone has any idea?

JLJac on October 20, 2014, 08:12:04 PM:

'variable/member "pos" has semantic "POSITION" which is not visible in this profile;'

To make my shader work I was cutting and pasting code I found on the internet, so have no idea exactly where this "pos" variable came from - but it didn't do any damage until I actually used it in the shader. Then it stopped working. Now it seems to at random sometimes not work in the editor either, hehe.

What I used it for, and what I actually want, is a screen coordinate of the fragment I'm handling. So if there's any other way to do that, I'd be happy to switch away from this troublemaker.

JLJac on October 21, 2014, 05:09:11 AM:

Thanks!

Update 342
Solved the problem with the offset, but the problem when publishing the build persists. Added distortion effect below the surface and correct perspective on the surface. Also started a little bit on having the physics react to the presence of the water.



Color still WIP.

jamesprimate on October 21, 2014, 08:55:42 AM (Last Edit: October 21, 2014, 09:02:07 AM):

hnggggg this looks so damn good. ill have you all know that just 2 DAYS AGO, Joar was saying water effects were probably impossible, yet here we are and these are some PRETTY NICE WATER EFFECTS :D

JLJac on October 22, 2014, 01:37:37 AM:

Update 343
Messing around with slugcat swimming... James and I are discussing this from a game design perspective as well. However, diving is turning out to be so much fun that I think it'll just have to be in the game... But maybe in a limited way - like, you can dive down, but you'll have to be skillful about it or you'll drown very easily. It all needs to make sense with the "rain kills you" theme as well, if the slugcat is perfectly comfortable under water that whole thing seems a little less viable. But, all those questions aside, the simple aspect of controlling the slugcat in the water is turning out pretty good! I'll gif you when I have some bubbles.

Also, the shaders keep messing with me -.- Sometimes when I open the editor, they work, sometimes not. Now it's
'variable/member "scrPos" has semantic "WPOS" which is not visible in this profile;'
does anyone have any idea how you make something "visible in the profile"?

jamesprimate on October 22, 2014, 09:16:37 AM:

Haha these are great questions and discussion! Jusst so Joar doesn't have to go back through and answer all of them:

* Yes, the concept is that rain kills by battery, pummeling and smothering anything that gets in its way (like a huge natural power sprayer is kind of the idea), but its def true that does seem to not be terribly extreme since the game playing audience is used to "acid poison lava void levels" sort of thing. So we'll need to make sure the threatening "water = dangerous" theme is carried through to this new traversable form to.

One thing is that you will often encounter light rains in the game as a warning, building up very obviously to the deadly downpour, so we are thinking of keeping that same mechanic with the water: safe when relatively calm, but then can build to deadly rough waves and storm when the Death Rains come, before being pummeled AND drowned.

* as for the another world style tentacles, prettttty much? unless we want CRAZY feature creep, we'll want to have a "reason" to limit the scope of what the cat can do in the water to a fairly shallow reach (for now at least), so we've talked about having some SCARY WEIRD SEA THINGS lurking down there to do just that. There have been a few loosely defined water region creatures in our "design document" (LOL) for a while, but this will be more of an elemental, unspecified thing im guessing. Unknown things moving around deep under the sea is probably the scariest thing ever, so I feel like this will be amazing for mood. Joar's water distortion effect already terrifies me, so im SUPER looking forward to seeing what he can do with this.

Im SO excited that the water regions are working out. You dont even know. It's been something we've been talking about for a long while, and from my perspective its necessary to complete the rain cycle motif. It ties into a few other things which are now possible because of this, like a puzzle piece being put into place. Got big plans for this!