The progress blog has been a bit quiet lately because there’s a lot of things in flight without a lot of cool things to show. Here’s a mini update on some things still in flight;
Surface crawling Swarm Alien
I’ve been experimenting with the idea of swarm aliens not being humanoid by default, and instead they are pesky little spider like creatures. The movement code for this has been really difficult, but here’s where it’s at right now.
There was a suggestion that I make the camera work kind of like the Skulk from Natural Selection 2, which I agree with. Right now the camera is just locked to the orientation of the spider for testing.
This is on semi-hold for now. It’s a cool thing to explore, but there are other more pressing things to work on.
Prediction System Testing
The prediction system introduced a handful of bugs. These were found in a short playtest last Monday. None of them super terrible, except for the one where dedicated servers don’t work, cause why not?
The test went pretty well overall, the real test will be with a full 12-16 player server.
Brood Alien Visual Upgrades
I commissioned the guy who made the monsters in Shoothouse to work on the Brood Alien for Morbus. It’s been a long back and forth process but it’s finally starting to be tested in game. I don’t have the textures yet, and have just been testing how it looks in game and animations.
I asked him to use the Citizen Human rig for the Brood Alien. S&Box doesn’t have native animation retargeting tooling built in (which sucks) so I had to manually retarget all the Citizen animations to work on the Brood Alien. This was a massive pain in the ass.
But hey, we got movement!
The tail was looking really bad so I went ahead and built some logic to procedually animate it based on movement;
It’s been hard
The past 3 weeks have been a ton of unexciting grinding. The prediction system took an entire week to implement, and then nearly an entire 2nd week to actually integrate back into the main Morbus codebase. Transformation was incredibly hard to do get right too.
My motivation has been lower this week. I might take a bit of time off soon or take a bit of a break to recharge.
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