Archive:
Ah, so, one thing I didn't consider when I made the character bigger: the number of animations needs to increase. Massively. Well, that and the fact it's not 2016 anymore. People expect IK, and fancy movement controllers... So I've taken a small step in that direction.
I've been working on the jump, fall and land animations. The jump considers which foot is leading and picks the appropriate animation, so the back foot provides the thrust. This is "reet-fancy", to use the technical term. At least for me. But it looks better.
Did another iteration of the run and walk cycle animations. They're a little stiffer and less cartoony than the first attempt. Still not 100% happy, but this is where I hit the wall of my animation skills.
Added some Quality Of Life settings: Digital controls are now optional -- full-analogue still uses the aim assist, under the hood -- and the camera's depth of field tracks the player as it moves about the room. Super subtle, but I'll notice it. (Future Gareth: QA noticed it, as well. And thought it was a bug…)
The hours messing about with the jump convinced me that a glide, when falling from large heights, would be cool. I thought this would be a simple case of updating the character motion controller's settings, on the fly, but for whatever reason it only seems to stick when the player's grounded? I couldn't work it out, so I hacked around it.
I need some dangling animations. And maybe a couple of landing animations.
The first game borrowed the Mario 64 blob-shadow trick – a decal is projected underneath the character, regardless of the light direction, so you know the exact position you’re going to land in – to help people aim. I was never too keen on it because it smeared over vertical surfaces. But I need something similar, so I've done a bit more work on it: Now it'll fade in and out, based on the character’s distance from the ground. Technically, it'll still project on vertical surfaces, but the dynamic alpha's enough to hide it "most of the time". A big improvement, imo.
The Hat's animating when you jump, and flapping about when you're floating. I think the base locomotion is there. I can't see any obvious pops or blend stalls.
The Wand is in! M
I moved the Wand master materials over from Maenhir, hooked up a new input control, and added code to update their material parameters, in the PlayerCharacter, so everything tracks correctly. It needs animation, but functionally it's working.
Like the first game, the Wand won't be a default item, it'll be a collectable. To support this, I added code to track which items are collected, and a way to bounce this back to the Game Instance when transitioning between levels. While I was in there, I added the scaffold for saving/loading state -- save game slots, basically -- and overrode StartPlayInEditorGameInstance so I can have debug settings / short-cuts when working in the editor.
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