Friday Devblog 6

We made a good push this week. It finally feels like we’re emerging from the darkness, reaching out for the light.

Player Model

You might be wondering why we haven’t added any player clothes since we released on Steam. Well that is obviously because the player model system is a huge car crash. All the clothes are included as part of the player model. I tackled that this week. The player model is now just animation data and we can drop models onto it. This means that in the future if we want to add a new set of clothes for the player – the artist just needs to model it. They don’t need to recompile the whole player.

This is a huge deal to us because we want to explore customizing the player’s look a lot in the future. We want improvised clothing. We want blood decals. This makes that feasible.

Player Animation

Player animation is something that I think we can all agree needs a bit of love. So we’ve switched over to Mechanim. This means we no longer code our animation system in code. We use an nice friendly editor.

This allows us to alter the animations nice and quickly, visually, logically. Did I mention that it’s really easy too?. Watch/Download the video The mechanim stuff has a bunch of cool IK stuff built in too. This means we don’t have to animate things like the player turning to face something, or looking up and down. We can do it in code – which makes it look a lot smoother. We can even place the hands and feet on world objects. This opens up a lot of possibilities for the future. Here’s what it looks like when we force the player model to point at a cube. This isn’t one of the possibilities. Watch/Download the video

Player Shadow

The player now has a shadow. This happened on accident and we decided we’d keep it in. It does feel quite nice in game, and gives you a greater sense of being there Watch/Download the video

Netcode

The network code is pretty much feature complete now.. and we’re currently testing it. Replacing the netcode might sound like a daunting task, but it turned out to be pretty simple. Early this week we were happily jumping about with other white cubes building campfire bridges. Watch/Download the video One of the big scary systems in the netcode went in this week. The PVS culling system. It’s a pretty simple system in theory. You divide the world up into a grid, then the player only gets information about stuff in the cell he’s in (and the surrounding cells). But there’s a lot of moving parts. You need to account for objects moving from one cell to another, you need to tell players in the cell it left that it’s now gone, and players in the cell it entered that it now exists, and what if a player is subscribed to both cells? You need to account for players moving between cells, you need to send players entering a cell the contents of that cell, you need to tell them to delete the contents of cells they’re leaving. But from tests this seems to have all worked out. So we got networking working, threw the player models on the players. Now we are at