Archive:
I tapped up Andrew Lemon, over Xmas, to do some Ansi art for the various monitors that are dotted around Moonbas. He smashed it, so I was dead excited to get them in the game. I added three, today, along with the missing cut-scene when you complete the electric floor puzzle (See: [[Week 79]])
I also added a hidden Boom box room, that’s a bit of a bastard. Rotating cubes, that sink as you land on them.
I’ve got one more Ansi to squeeze in, then Moonbas is done.
I applied to the BFI for the interim certificate for Videogame Tax Relief, which was about as exciting as it sounds. A big ol’ questionnaire, some budget spreadsheets, a bit of documentation, and a full play-through video (because, er, what’s a GDD?!) The BFI are sound, always been super helpful in the past, so hopefully this should go through without issue. That said, it’s quite challenging trying to explain the Britishness of a game that’s, essentially, a rose-tinted nostalgia trip through my childhood videogame collection, while trying to keep a straight face and sound like a Professional Game Developer (TM).
I’ve tried a couple of different ways to get in touch with Sandy White but I’ve not heard anything back, which (on the plus side) isn’t a “No”, but it’s also not a “Yes”… I don’t want to take the Michael, so I’ve gone through every bit of the Antesher model and either remodelled it, moved it, rotated it, or all of the above. The reference is obvious, but now it’s a pastiche rather than “The Actual Map”.
Shame, it would have been cool AF to ship the OG Antesher.
Made decent progress populating more of Nu Antesher; added in a couple of ducks, with level sequences, some hidden pickups, and re-used the Pygame snake, which lead me down a little bug rabbit hole.
Turns out the snakes never calculated how high the player was when they cancelled a jump (well, not properly), so you could make them dizzy from any old height. Fixed that, which lead me to look at the camera shakes. These spawn when the player lands from a cancelled jump, and modulate their strength based on the distance of the fall. I’ve always known there was something fishy about these, but having looked at it, the cancel height was never calculated properly. It was relying on a value generated inside the Player Character’s Tick that er… wasn’t updated unless you were grounded. Nice. So I fixed that. And then I noticed that if you land inside any of the trigger boxes attached to a Push Block, then you might not go into a push stance. So I fixed that. But if you hit the Action Button to push the block, and you’re not in a push stance, you soft lock. Unlocking the player controller is fired from an animation event, for an animation that’s never triggered. So, I fixed that.
The rabbit hole didn’t end there, but you get the idea.
I think I’ve done all I’m going to in Nu-Ant for a while. I’ve added in the Camera collectable, with a nice cut-scene to explain the controls, another Duck Door, tweaked more of the buildings, ensured you can’t teleport out of the room until you’ve unlocked the camera, and fixed up the Jump Box so you can stack one on top of the other, then alternate between the two to climb as high as you want. Although, now I think about it, I should put some limits on that. There’s bound to be a crazy internet person that tries to use them to climb to the moon…
I also added the last of Andy’s ANSI art to the Jukebox. Very happy with how those came out…
Added a room that forces you to learn how to use two jump boxes to climb heights.
And very nearly finished another, that uses wind sources to push the player about. Turns out there’re some limitations to UE’s wind sources, the worst being that you can’t adjust the speed at run time. I was planning on slowly ramping the wind up and down, but nah. Can’t find a way to do that. You can turn them on and off, though, so it’s not the end of the world. They’re only responsible for the effect on the cloth sim – I push the player character about in code – so once I add VFX and Audio, then I doubt anyone will notice.
Had to re-record a playthrough for my BFI application. Didn’t quite do a full, 100% run, but it was close. My speed-run time clocked in at 1.5 hours, which isn’t bad. Sandy’s is going to end up being smaller than I’d like, but there’s still plenty of game to uncover.
Took the opportunity to log all the PSOs again, and then dug through the docs to find a way to pop up a message, when the game is run for the first time, to say that “PSOs are being compiled”. I need to get rid of that 10-20 seconds, it’s a loooong time to be staring at a black screen…
I found a plug-in on Fab that claimed to do exactly what I wanted, so I bought it, and was mightily disappointed. It iterated through the Asset Manager to force a load of every material and Niagara System, which yeah, kinda helps, but doesn’t remotely get rid of all the hitches in-game or force everything to be compiled.
The docs for FShaderPipelineCache were a bit more useful, and lead me to a way to count the remaining pre-compiles (FShaderPipelineCache::NumPrecompilesRemaining();, so now I’m able to throw up a bit of UI and display the count.
Which stopped splash screen movies (Triple Eh? & Numskull logo animations) from playing. JFC, why is it so hard to play a bastard movie at start-up?! I’ve lost the will to live at this point, so if they don’t magically re-appear I’m going to Burns Effect some static images and be done with it. Gngngngng
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