JLJac on June 23, 2015, 11:16:42 AM:

Update 442

Further work on the fish creature. I've also stared on some water splashes, which I know are not really all the way there. It should probably have some sort of highlights on it making it appear less dark - but that is difficult without making the individual sprites more obvious. It's supposed to look like a unified mass of water rather than sprites, and if I add some kind of specular effect in the shader the shader would still only know about the specific sprite it handles, so it would be difficult to keep it unified.



Suggestions?

JLJac on June 23, 2015, 11:51:06 AM:

Poop fish gonna wreck ya!

Yup, the segmentation is the main problem. Just don't really know how to make a continuous flow that's also flexible. Is this better?

JLJac on June 24, 2015, 07:58:17 AM:

I hereby retract writing "poop fish" and want to state for the record that it was meant as a joke, never as a suggestion 

Update 443



Am I getting there? 

JLJac on June 24, 2015, 08:47:44 AM:

Cool! Then I'll apply this on the surface splashes as well 

@Wolfgang141, hi, welcome! Those cucumbers are awesome! I especially like the one where you can see how the seeds are propelled by the water.

JLJac on June 24, 2015, 08:53:25 AM:

Not at all sir, I think this is good proof that you guys giving me a hard time yields good results

JLJac on June 24, 2015, 12:15:51 PM:

In the actual game the fish needs to take in water to spray out water, I just gave it infinite water for the sake of the gif. Remember that what you see here is generally tailored to show off the technical progress, not to indicate the canon of the game. So assume that the game will not work like what you see in the gifs, but if you're curios feel free to ask!

JLJac on June 24, 2015, 01:50:07 PM:

Puh!



Remember in the kickstarter budget breakdown when we said no jet skis? Lies! 

JLJac on June 25, 2015, 01:46:55 AM:

Hahaha tough crowd >__<

I did some smoothing of the surface, but seriously, now I have to move on from water stuff. Could keep messing with it literally forever...

Also, free willy, gross edition!

jamesprimate on June 25, 2015, 02:06:34 AM:

LMAO that's amazing.  Messing with them in the new build, they have so much personality!

jamesprimate on June 25, 2015, 06:24:51 AM:

from my playing i see procedural fins, whiskers and flippers. they can look pretty unique! not quite lizard-level, but more-so than the current vulture or any other creature so far.

JLJac on June 29, 2015, 02:43:05 AM:

Update 444

Doing a little stealth/sneaking push. I hope that this, together with the now implemented creature noise tracking will finally introduce stealth as a viable tool to the player.

Basically what is going on is that the old binary laser vision of creatures (is there terrain in the way yes/no?) is giving way to a soft visibility calculation for any position on the screen.

The most basic part of this is that vision deteriorates with distance. But on top of that calculation comes other stuff - for example the lizards have a forward-centered vision, meaning that their vision is better in front of them but worse in the periphery. If the vision is worse to the sides, that means that the target needs to be closer there in order to give a "yes" in the vision check, which causes a bubble-shaped vision cone.



You can probably see that the vision is a bit movement dependent as well - when the player is moving the vision reaches a bit further. This motion dependency for the vision can be set creature by creature, meaning we could potentially have some creature that is virtually blind unless you move, making for some tense Jurassic park-style scenes where you remain totally still as some beast is sniffing around uncomfortably close.

The main factor in the above gif is however a camouflage mechanic, which is here applied to the player when sneaking (basically when crouching). When in sneak mode the player is 50% camouflaged, which is mirrored in the lizard's halved vision range. This is the same mode that makes you pretty much soundless as you move. I hope that these two things combined will actually make sneaking a real viable tactic when traversing the environments - after posting this I will give the game a spin trying to traverse a region and see how it feels.

Also, the vision system allows for using some elements of the environment to hide.




The water has two negative vision bonuses that can be set creature by creature. One is a simple negative that applies if either the "eye" position or the "test" position is under water, basically meaning that a creature might be able to see half as far under water or similar. The other is a negative bonus that occurs if the "eye" is above water and the "test" position is below, or vice versa. This symbolizes the surface itself as being difficult to see through with reflections etc - if you try to look down into the water you might have a harder time seeing what is going on than if you actually stick your head down there.

I don't yet know how this affect performance, but I can actually imagine it being for the better. I have put the super heavy ray-trace at the very end of this whole calculation, and of course only do it if the environmental factors, camouflage etc has not already ruled out that the vision check might be a "yes". So potentially it might save a ray-trace here and there!

JLJac on June 30, 2015, 01:54:45 PM:

@Christian, yep, all of those are possible! When it comes to creatures with eyes on the sides, that's hard in this weird 2D context, as the sides would be towards and away from the camera. What makes sense from a gameplay and sneak perspective is having the vision be concentrated in front of the creature.

@tortoiseandcrow haha I will do the test run soooon! I'm just way too bad at actually playing the game hehe

Update 445

Made lizards swim. These standard sub-species generally just swim at the surface of the water, and quite awkwardly. But at least they can swim now! It felt really weird to have that strange cop-out with lizards dying in water but nothing else - the game world has been taken beyond that sort of stuff since then. With that out of the way there is another interaction that makes sense, and one less strange exception the player needs to learn.



Also it looks funny!

JLJac on July 01, 2015, 12:24:21 PM:

@Keith, thank you so much :D Keep in mind that animation != gameplay though O___O

Don't worry, instead of weird chemical death you will be able to have them eaten by leeches!

Update 446

I've been working on a water lizard, it will be salamander or axolotl-inspired in its appearance. During the day I've been setting the creature up and dealt with the various path finding related issues that I inevitably run into. Drawing a head for the lizard took about an hour, bug hunting why the hell it wouldn't go into shortcuts under water took 2, after which I tried several fixes that didn't work, after which I applied a 5 minute fix that I feel like, in the back of my mind, that it might break the vulture. Hahaha. Inheritance is great for the fact that if you solve a problem in one place, you solve it in all of them. The backside however is that if you solve a problem for one of the inheriting classes, you might break something for another one. We'll see what happens.

It's strange how much more time I spend messing with my damn technical issues rather than adding content, and maybe not a good thing. But what to do? I have to get it to work, one way or another. Anyway, now it can enter the shortcut and I'll try to get some cool swimming animation running ~

jamesprimate on July 01, 2015, 01:23:41 PM:

spot on! we originally intended to do a Kowloon-inspired region early on, but couldnt get the scale and tile to work right. also, it veered a bit too close to showing the specifics about the previous occupants of rain world, how they lived, etc., so we opted to go in another direction.


quite a few, and the list keeps growing. some are going to be really challenging too.  we have our work cut out for us

jamesprimate on July 02, 2015, 08:23:33 AM:

Yellows! I hope so. Seems like something that will go well in the next region actually.

So ive been quiet the past week or so, mostly because this Shoreline region that im working on has become all-consuming. Im finishing it up now, and minus the narrative-specific rooms that we'll be adding in later, its already over 100 screens... which is a little over 3x the size of the Suburban region. So its *huge*.



That said, it might actually be the tightest region conceptually, and im super happy with how it is turning out. The game mechanic possibilities of open water swimming was just too good to not explore in depth, and that we certainly have! Plus, you can't imply the scale of "ocean" without some serious scope, right?

JLJac on July 02, 2015, 09:18:42 AM:

So cool looking 


Don't worry! This visualization has the camouflage value of the player specifically weighted in, but when several creatures are around it calculates a value like that for each of them separately.


Yup, yellows and reds will feature - they're actually in the game at this point, though they don't have much specific behavior written for them, they're basically just pinks with slightly different speed etc right now. But they will get some more attention when we get to the regions where they live.

Update 447

Got some visuals on the water lizard/axolotl! Now I have to give it a unique swimming animation, and it should be good to go.

JLJac on July 02, 2015, 10:20:32 PM:

Nah we don't have 700 rooms yet, but now the forecast is looking like we'll break through that, and 1000 might not be entirely impossible either if James keeps this pace O___O

But keep in mind that strictly we are counting screens here, not rooms - which makes comparisons a bit difficult. In Knytt a screen is a room I remember correctly, so there the comparison makes sense, but shadow complex is a side scroller where each room is several screens large right, so then the comparison falls apart. Back in suburban region I think the average room was something like 1.2 screens (almost every room was a one-screener with a few two- or three-screeners) but in this latest region I'd say that the number has gone up to something crazy like 3.5 screens per room on average or similar. So despite being waaaay larger than SU I wouldn't be surprised if it actually had fewer rooms.

jamesprimate on July 03, 2015, 12:00:58 AM:

  you guys...



quick look says we're near 500, which seems about right pace from current estimations. A couple of these next regions are of a similar sort of scale and structure to Shoreline, so 900ish seems very possible.

Worth pointing out though that the larger-scale regions are generally much less complex from a terrain standpoint. In a lot of ways, the game layout is such that there are "dense rooms designed for things to happen in" and "transition rooms that give an impression of movement through the world". So often the time spend in a single screen room will actually be greater than the 4-5 screen room that preceded it.

Similarly, the conceptual effort that goes into a single-screen room vs what goes into a 10-screen room is roughly the same (tiling and etc takes longer ofc, but thats not nearly as fussy), so whereas i can probably do 3 solid single-screen rooms in a day i could likely do 2 8-screen rooms in that same period of time. so basically what im trying to say is its not the size that counts!!111 er

but that said, this all bodes well for the production rate. Despite being the largest by far Shoreline was also the quickest to complete, and since the next 2 or 3 regions are of a similar sort of structure and scale, im hoping that carries through! if so it could do wonders for our timeline.

/wonk

JLJac on July 03, 2015, 10:44:10 PM:

The cool thing with ambiguity is that they can be if you want to! You think that explanation is cool, so you can project that onto it, but someone else might think something else is cooler, and they can project that James and I have our ideas about what's going on, but that's hardly relevant - art happens in the observer, or however that saying goes. What is relevant however is how we implant some patterns that create a half-visible fragment of context throughout the world. The "project what you want" thing is only fun as long as you think that you're on to something, if you find out that it's just a grey glop of ambiguity to project your own ideas on you'll just be very annoyed when you eventually see through that bluff *hrrrmm* So it's all about a balance - we will have our ideas about what's what, but keep it quite blurry, and you'll be able to map your own understanding on the world and hopefully find some interesting connections between one thing and the other, while never being outright told what's going on. Wish us luck!

Update 448

Salamanders!

JLJac on July 04, 2015, 01:33:13 AM:

Thanks :D

Question: I've started looking at lizard voice now, and want to do something similar to what happened in the lingo version where the animation responds a bit to the audio. Ie I want audio visualization. I've been glancing a bit at this but it seems to be a bit too unity-specific and seems to utilize the unity UI rather than a code interface. What I want is basically a thing that is hooked up to a unity audio source, and then you can ask it for volume and maybe pitch of the sound it's playing right now. This looks a bit leaner and maybe better, but I'm really wanting for some documentation for these assets - just a list of what methods you can call on them, that sort of stuff. Am I just being stupid for not seeing some button that bring that stuff up or something? There's gotta be something like what I want in the asset store, but the asset store appears pretty pig in a poke to me - I can't seem to find much technical details about exactly how the stuff works without buying it. Maybe because they're written in C# and could pretty much be re-created by any unity user; an explanation of exactly what it does would be giving away the blueprint...?

Any experienced unity users that have some tips about light-weight, code-based audio visualization? Or just about how the asset store works haha? Jimym GIMBERT?