Archive:
Sat down to play the build on the big telly, last night, and guess what… [[Week 74]]’s flickering directional light problem (Willy’s Mansion) is back, with a vengance. Not happy.
Got up this morning and deleted all the lighting, atmosphere, clouds and fog, from Willy’s and cut-and-pasted the ones from Sandy Whites in, then spent the morning re-lighting everything. Shakes fist at the sky
I’m falling back on the eye-adaptation to brighten up the really dark rooms, but I’ve no idea if that works on the Switch. Sigh. Whose dumb idea was it to have indoor rooms…
Finished the windy room, with some audio, VFX and pillars to hide behind. Works nicely, so I think I’ll do another version but with pillars tied to the Wand…
One of the things I’ve wanted to do since the start was add Gilby, from Iridis Alpha, as a controllable character with its own set of rooms, so I’ve modelled it (not the hardest thing in the world) and made a start on some of the animations. I’m thinking something vaguely similar to the way the old PSX game Kula World worked – a criminal overlooked little gem, imo – but I’m not sure how that’ll play without a time-limit, and I’m wary of people getting stuck in there. I’ll soon find out tomorrow…
I can teleport into Gilby rooms, posses him, and I’ve done two of the three movement cases needed to run around Kula World style meshes. Wasn’t that fiddly tbh, apart from hitting a gimbal lock with FRotators. A quick swap to quaternions fixed that. Note to self: FRotators aren’t Quaternions. I keep assuming they’re safe for this stuff.
I was going to use vertex colours on the mesh to indicate valid movements at each point, as that would have been trivial to setup in the editor; import a mesh, dab some paint in the corners, Gilby raycasts onto the mesh, grabs the verts, reads the colour, and Bob’s your mother’s brother. Except vertex colours aren’t exposed in packaged builds (well, I could probably uncomment some stuff in the source, but nah), so I’ve resorted to a few ‘Lego’ bricks, with splines attached. Gilby raycasts down, hits a Lego brick, asks for the appropriate spline for the direction he’s facing, and then runs a timeline to move along it. Bit messy in the editor, but saved me some maths in the Blueprint. Should simplify the Jump a bit as well.
Gilby can walk across surfaces, climb walls, roll over the top of columns and generally mooch about. Didn’t get time to add the jump, but I did spend a couple of hours messing about with different shapes, to see what works and what doesn’t. The original game does a nice trick with the camera; it’s placed close enough that it can rely on back-face culling to hide walls. Mine’s a bit too far away (and the character’s too large), to rely on that, so I’ve made a material that fades as it gets close to the camera. It’s not perfect – and I have the same problem in Nu Antesher tbh, cos the camera will quite happily clip thorough things in there – but it’s probably good enough.
I’m currently rocking psychedelic metal. Can’t not be, given who I’m robbing…
Kula World’s levels were against the clock. I doubt that’ll work in 2umo, but the time pressure’s cool… I have 10 of Ben Daglish’s tunes left, and Boom Boxes are against the clock… Bosh; I need to make 10 Gilby rooms. Two problems solved.
I’d done all Gilby’s character controller stuff in a blueprint, because I’m at the point in the project where I figure it’d be quicker, and it doesn’t matter if it gets messy. Well, it does matter, and at 2 in the afternoon – when I was getting fed-up trying to remove a couple of glitches – it sailed past my mess threshold. Deleted the lot, and re-wrote everything in C++. Much tidier, far less code, and easier to read. Fair play if you like noodle graphs for everything, but I have my limits.
Normally, for this kinda thing, I’d do a Finite State Machine, but instead I’m checking which GameplayTags Gilby has and responding to those during Tick. This is super-clean, and although I got a lot of the way there with the main PlayerCharacter refactor, back in [[Week 61]], it proved the point; I could have dropped the FSM entirely. I’m tempted to refactor Maenhir’s player, when I go back to it…
Yesterday felt like I ended up standing still, so to make myself feel better I decided to tick off a couple of big jobs: I did a full pass over Willy’s and added any missing audio that I could spot, and added audio to the Intro Sequence. I trawled through the first game and pulled out a few sound effects to use, which I doubt many people will notice, but it does tie the games together.
Added an intro and outro to Space Toms, and an intro to Mutant Camels. I’m quite pleased with the Mutant Camels one, flying along the cassette worked really nicely. T’was worth spending a day on, purely for the joke about Jeff’s Camel font; he’s always said that he’d have been rich if he’d licensed it, given how often it was stolen. Well, it’s my font now! (Jeff: I’ll buy you a pint…)
Played through the game on the Switch, Deck and the Big Telly. The lighting in Willy’s was off (unsurprisingly), so I’ve done another pass on that. Instead of relying on the eye adaptation, I added a smidge of ambient cube map (in the post process) to lift things away from black, tweaked the saturation and contrast, and reduced the overall brightness. I also spent some time on the volumetric clouds, as they were the wrong colour and far too dense. I think the wispy ones I’ve got now are pretty good, tbh. Might be the best they’ve ever looked.
I did spot a few niggly bugs – the rotating room in Sandy’s pauses on the Big Telly, despite not doing it on any other machine I own – so I put in fixes for those, but I’ve not had time to test them. My speed run is still over an hour. A full run, on three machines, is too much for me to do in a single sitting.
That said, the Switch build seems to be in a really good place. No heinous slowdowns, the overall look to the lighting is starting to feel consistent, and no platform-specific bugs that I could see. I was worried it’d end up as bad as the Vita port of the first game, which was god-awful (don’t look at it), but it seems fine atm. I can’t wait to do a full-beans version for Switch 2. Mega Lights?
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