hey everyone its been a while since I posted, wanted to show you the progress Ive made during my breaks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaoPkojDkmsIts a squad based shooter Im working on, and the video shows you the different parts of the game Ive isolated to get them modular. So far Ive gotten down a few of the major parts of the game:
1. 3d Pathfinding with multiple entities:
After the nodes are placed in the level, I use Test Runner entities to move to a specified node beforehand to see how well the nodes are placed, then move to a random node. These little guys update the console with information such as how long the pathfinding function took and whether it has lost its Line of Sight with its target node. I have also replaced their model with my Keith model for fun
. There are also node blockers, which are map entities that are placed to block nodes from seeing each other if the level calls for it. At the moment the entity avoidance is at best crude. The base pathfinding was made with George Pirvu's excellent Perfect AI from the AUMS, and I cant thank him enough.
2. Multiple Bone Rotation towards target:
Error014 helped me achieve bone rotation limits. A bone will stop rotating if the target angle was above a given number. What I added was being able to have the head rotate towards it's own target on top of the torso bone which has the head as a child. After I figured this out, I was able to make eyeballs rotate on top of head rotations, on top of torso rotations all within the same model(not using seperate entities for the eyes). Although you cant see it clearly in the video, it is creepy and cool to see the eyes track the camera. Along with the multiple childeren rotation, I am now able to nudge rotations of already tracking bones. With this I can easily implement body hit checks that affects aiming, and things like "ducking" while shooting as shown in the video.
3. Realtime IK:
I call it the Poor Man's Realtime IK. One of the characters that will join your team will be a large muscular soldier carrying a large machine gun, that must be carried with 2 hands. The initial problem was having the arms track the target, but the arm carrying the handle in the front would be out of rotation and holding nothing. The Poor Man's IK would be applyed to the front arm ,which will cause the arm and hand to snap correctly to the handle in front. Although its not seen in the video, this IK will be used for this purpose along with many, MANY others......robotic spider legs adjusting to terrain.... holding the hand of a following NPC......
4. Bodypart Collisions:
This fun little system implements body part sensitive collisions. Using sprites sitting on top of bones as collision boxes, incoming projectiles trigger hit checks on the sprites. In turn the hit sprites tell the model to adjust the bone angle, or more easily, switch to a pain animation of the corresponding bodypart. Right now there are only front and back hit directions, but many more can be easily added. This should open up some nice subtle elements of gameplay.... damage from behind or at the flanks are greater.....headshots.....shoot the legs of an armored target to impair movement....shoot hands to throw off aim....customizable body armor.....
5. Target Switching and LOS:
Although not as cool looking as the others, the targetting system is important. Once a soldier sees a target, he will track it and fire at it until it goes out of LOS. If he sees another target he will fire upon that one.(assuming the soldier remains stationary). Although it looks stupid now, it should be easily appendable to the soldiers AI to seek the target after it has lost LOS, and to aquire new targets if they come into LOS (would be stupid for a soldier to chase down one soldier if a new enemy attacks him)
I normally dont post things like this, but Ive realized Ive come a long way during the summer and my free time. I wanted to show you guys how much work is going into this game. Most likely, based on my current schedule, I will be putting the "How To" of how I did everything on my website in the future.
Tell me what you think.
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Keep this stuff up!
