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"Devlog - 03.02.2017"

Posted: 03 February, 2017

It's been a mad-cap couple of weeks. Here's what I've been up to:

Lumo

Yesterday I pushed out version 1.17.2, to fix issues found with wireless Xbone pads running on Windows 7. Thanks go out to Patrick Hogan --- the developer of InControl, a nice cross platform input library for Unity that I can recommend, available here --- for sparing the time to test around the issue and provide a fix.

In addition to taking on the new version of InControl, I've also moved over to XInput, so --- in theory --- joypad support should be a little more robust on Windows going forward. (Crosses Fingers)

This build also fixes a possible bug with joypad "submit" actions not being registered by the pause screen UI, as well as turning off Unity's bullshit "automatic" navigation option on some of the button layouts. Honestly, fuck that UI system.

Neutrino

I've been doing a bit of train / weekend coding, so this has moved forward:

• Finished off the Input system. You can now poll mouse and up to four joypads. Previously it only handled attach/dettach events.
• Added some keystate handling for specific inputs in editor modes (keyboard shortcuts, basically)
• Added a bunch of helper functions to quickly get sprites from texture pages
• Got the Tile Map editor to the point where you can select and place tiles, freely, or snapped to a grid

Next job is to store that in something I can spit out and reload that'll be the basis of the level data. I'll probably do a very thin Command pattern wrapper over this so I can support unlimited Undo/Redo as well.

Next Game

I've been all over the shop with this the last couple of weeks:

• Finished off the weapon-types code and added weapon pickups
• Player can now be killed, either through damage or falling out of the world
• Player respawns properly
• Added Ammo to the HUD
• Added decals, and spent a morning drawing swears on walls
• Added a new "Pain Room" to the test room, for traps and damage/stat tweaking
• Dipped my toe into Cascade, UE4's particle system, and made some effects for pickups
• Started on a shotgun model for the first person view
• Added some new models for the ammunition pickpus

The last item in that list has been my main diversion since the last post.

I know that I'm going to be doing a fair amount of modelling on this project so I'm still slowly schooling myself on workflows. For this, I decided to do some fairly high poly models of the pickup items and then bake them down to a low poly cage. Like everything, once I worked out how to do it, it's reasonably straight forward, but it took a day or so to really get it working.

Building low poly cages seems to be a bit of an art, depending on the sorts of shapes you want, but after a lot of attempts I was able to bake AO and normals in Modo that looked pretty clean on the low poly asset, and came out clearly in-engine. I'm far from an expert at this, but it's something I wanted to have in the toolbox even if I don't use it very often.

I also spent a day or two messing about with Substance Painter. The "rent to own" model really appeals to me, as well as fitting in my budget, so I jumped on that. It's a little unstable on my rig - I've had 4 or 5 really messy crashes - but when it's working, it's great. I doubt I'll delve too deeply into the materials for this game, but anything that speeds up texturing is going to be worth the effort learning.

Now that Vine is dead I've started posting screenshots and little vids onto my Instagram account. You can keep an eye-out, here.

Also, there's been a big migration of developers from Twitter onto Mastodon.social. If you're a twitter user then I don't really need to explain why this is happening, but if not and you're interested in a low traffic, Nazi-free open source Twitter-alike then Mastodon is worth checking out. I'm @korruptor as usual.

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