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"Weekly Update 12.06.2020"

Posted: 12 June, 2020

I'm going to post weekly updates about the stuff I've been doing, now that the blog is back up and running. This is more for my reference, I guess, but some of you might be interested.

Company Stuff

• Started the process of moving some of the Lumo store pages back to Triple Eh? as RSG's license is ending. PS4 and Xbox versions won't be available from July. PC reverts to me, and I've organised for Thalamus to take over the Switch version.
• Sent in the application to BFI for Video Game Tax relief. Maenhir should qualify.
• Updated the company website. New images and some blurb.
• Updated the Lumo website. Change of Licensing information.
• Invoiced. Woo!
• Started speccing some work for a contract.

Maenhir

• Moved the player character mesh from Modo to Blender, and re-did the animation rig and material settings
• Retargeted the existing animations and anim blueprints over to the new rig. And it actually worked.
• Added cloth simulation to the Player's cloak. Took a while to get something I vaguely liked, but it's a definite improvement.
• Replaced the character (night and day) in the main menu with the new stuff and removed the old post-process cell-shading
• Re-did the high-res (12k!) screen shots of the character in front of the logo. The old night time one had some artifacts in the logo where I'd pushed the colour curve into a weird place, so I made a clean version from the vector original, with the colour swatches set to what I wanted.
• Updated Unreal to version 4.25.1. This turned out to be mostly painless. One code line change, and the addition of some paths to the build target.
• Reimplemented the check for physics material that happens during footfall. Instead of a location in front of the character, the raycast goes from the foot's position. When you’re running along the edge of two materials you get the correct audio.
• Instead of returning the first physics material hit, this now iterates through all blocking hits for a material with an audio ID. My hacky overlaid AO no longer mutes footstep audio.
• Z-Targets on one-time things, like toggle-switches, remove themselves and pop the player out of Z-Targeting mode when they’re “done”.
• Fixed a whole bunch of stupid bugs that can happen when you press left trigger. It didn't check anything. Now it checks all the things.
• Z-Target icons weren't responding correctly when you re-triggered them. Now they do.
• Made a little "pop" VFX that plays just before the player holds up an item during an identity ceremony. Makes the transition look a bit sexier. Needs audio.
• Created a bunch of coloured gem pickup items that'll be used for currency. My rupee equivalents, basically.
• Created the various identity ceremony versions of each
• Added text for each
• Made notification icons for each
• Created a low-value spawn list, so grass and bushes can spawn the odd rupee
• Uncovered the most amazing set of bugs in the pickup system, where the pickup was dereferencing an enum, into the wrong table. By blind luck and a complete fluke of ordering, the UIDs of the existing items just happened to have a matching order in these two tables. This exploded spectacularly when the gems were added and confused the absolute shit out of me.
• Removed some duplication of dialog text UIDs. The identity version triggers the dialog, it’s the only place that needs the UID.
• Fixed the identity ceremony actors so they can be tilted and rotated properly. Finally.
• Made sure that the fishing rod picks up Rupees. Because yeah.
• Rebuilt the chest appear VFX. This is the one thing I’ve found that broke in the engine upgrade. Emitters were no longer paying any attention to the timeline. Couldn’t find a way to fix other than to re-build.
• Colourised the action button icons so they look a bit nicer
• Added infinite keys cheat modes to the dev menu
• Fixed the broken edging in the baby dungeon. I’d changed the origins of the mesh in the FBX so they all matched, which broke the old placement.
• Beatmatched the bounce of the indicator icon on the main menu to the song playing in the back ground.
• Animated the flowers in the outdoor areas so they bounce. These will also need to be beatmatched when I get final music. I can feel a GENERIC SYSTEM coming on…

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