Casual Dev Update 2

Hey everybody!

This week I have been working on providing clarity to the end-user! A bunch of this is animation work, unfortunately, but lets talk about it!

So, earlier this week I thought I would try and avoid spending hours learning something new and outsource my animation work. I scoured the FAB marketplace, hunting for melee animations like needles in a haystack. There are like ten entire free melee animations in the FAB marketplace, and none of them are intended for use in first person. Fun fact, our game is in first person. They don't work too well.

I mean, I tried. Take this melee, for instance:

I hacked it off of a First person knife animation armature. This does NOT read in first person. I wish it was still wired in so I could demonstrate that, but I am not going to go rewire it to demonstrate. Imagine the hand popping into frame for a single second. Not user-readable at all.

So, in an attempt to circumnavigate this issue, I tried making a first person rig out of this asset. I have the .fbx file on my desktop, but it's un-imported state adequately signals how much that didn't work.

So I brought it up to the team today, mentioned how unsatisfactory it all was, and walked away with two new goals.

1: Convert all weaponry onto the dominant hand. This means I have to build a structure to allow the player to cycle through weapons and stick it on the player somewhere. I'm thinking something like a weaponSwapInterface.h or other baloney.

2: pop the player into third person when they swap to the melee weapon.

Which is doable, I thought. But it sounded incredibly clunky. So then I got to finding and converting idle and attack animations for the player and enemies to use, you know some more fleshed out stuff.

Maximo was a lifesaver in this endeavor. Mainly because FAB contained exclusively this one:

But they all introduce a movement component, which I then have to handle. If the character doesn't move, then all the other animations look odd and the whole thing becomes a mess. If the character does move, it could end up all kinds of places and lock the player into a 10 second animation they have to commit to. What we have going so far is not conducive to either of these introductions.

So I scrapped objective 2 and bit the bullet.

NOW INTRODUCING...

PIRATE BODY CONTROL RIG V.1!!!!

It actually was way easier to make than I was expecting. I just have to now watch about 13 hours of YouTube tutorials to make this thing fleshed out to it's fullest potential and then we can use this baby to animate any similar humanoid in engine!

Hopefully I'll be wrapped up by Thursday night and have the player properly moving, shooting, and melee-ing so that I can also work on the myriad of UI elements I have to catch up on. Including, but not limited to:

1. Tower Selection UI / Menu
2. Tower Possession UI / Menu
3. Tower Health Indicators
4. and Context Sensitive Control Popups.