Happy holidays! 2014-2015

Random Picture: Happy Holidays 2014-2015

So it's almost a done deal.  A "new" year is right around the corner!  I have a fairly long post this time, some game related and some rants.  So I'll break it down into sections.

-Game dev related-

I finished the main retopologizing on the witch.  It took a lot longer than I wanted it to due to laziness and a bunch of stuff that needed my attention.

I'm currently modeling in details that probably aren't really necessary, but I need the practice since I'm still an ubber nubber.

I'll try to get her done before my Xmas break is over.

-RANTS (not game dev related, read if board)-


--Rice Krispies toys for less fortunate children...--

OK If you don't know what I'm talking about take a look at this first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tya8UtlOIA

Yes - yes, it sounds like an awesome idea.  Who doesn't want to see a child less fortunate have a happy Christmas?  So what's my problem with the above advertising then?

That kid has like 4 presents already!  I grew up poor!  And that house hold is defiantly not poor!

So ya, major fail snap crackle pop, on trying to depict poverty in a 1st world country....



--CBSA (Canadian Border Service Agency) AKA: the fucking fuckers who (proverbially) fucked my ass at Christmas!--

So you learn something new everyday.  I've heard the stories about items being withheld at customs and duties and fees being rammed down the throats of people who buy cars and other big purchases across the border.

When I started ordering anime dvd's from Crunchy, everything seemed fine.  Usually I would get just one dvd on special.  It would come in the mail and all was well.  I didn't think that I would be charged some arbitrary and random fee at some point.

On black Friday they had some pretty good specials, so I took the liberty of buying some of the full season dvd sets of the series I liked enough to actually own.  Since I've never had problems with customs for single dvd's, I'm going to assume that the box with 4 dvd's set off CBSA's "lets screw this guy" sensor.

Anyway, today I got my box of dvd's and was sheepishly asked by the mail lady for 26.70 (rounded).  I was pretty surprised in a WTF kind of way.  I thought I was hearing things, and then she explained what the fee was about, and that if I did not cough up the money she was going to withhold my mail.  She sympathetically told me a story where she got screwed when she sent something back to the US.

Realizing that trying to go against the policy and procedure was just going to cost me more if I started my grievance on the spot, I reluctantly handed her the money.  She told me there was a number on the slip I could call to dispute the charge.

I was pretty shocked and really pissed off.  The stupidity and ridiculousness of our services and government in Canada have just set a new low in my book......  I've heard the really outrageous and somewhat unbelievable story's about the border service, but this is the first time I have actually had to deal with them.  I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone..

First-  Where the fuck do they get the idea they can just arbitrarily tax me at random?!  Sales taxes are suppose to be billed at the TIME OF SALE!  Billing the person after the fact, leads to double dipping.  Not to mention the person is left on the spot for an amount that, that person may not be able to pay!  It's called extortion!

Second- How the hell did they come up with 130.00 (rounded) dollars value?!  This dose not take into account the actual sale and specials!  I essentially got taxed for money I did not spend!

Third- While I don't like having my PRIVATE mail opened by strangers without warrant, I understand that sometimes they need to make sure no harmful stuff gets into the country.  However this dose not seem to be the reason they violated my charter rights and freedom.  They charged me 10 dollars (rounded) to take the privilege of violating my charter rights just so they could tax me some arbitrary amount!

The way I see it, this is extortion, plain and simple.

I could appeal this, but it's been my experience that if you go along with the dummy system, you end up spending more.  Even if you get a "discount", you become a dummy yourself.  As much as I hate giving in on principle alone, my time is worth more then 26 dollars that I probably will not entirely get back even if I successfully appeal it...

This rant may not amount to much.  But it's been my experience that simply stating your dissatisfaction in a public place often attracts others who where wronged.  And is the start of change.

Thankfully we still have (some) freedom of speech in this country.....


Edit: bunch of corrections.

Too Tired to Tile.

I finally had enough with doing tiles and wasn't getting any work done due to epically overpowering boredom....... So I moved to re-topologising the witch cause I messed it up pretty bad with topology that doesn't really deform well.  I also tweaked a few areas that where lacking definition before I started using it as a base.

Random Picture: Because that's what I said!

Almost nothing to do with game development: Opinion of various incidents and happenings around Canada.

Its defiantly been an “interesting” couple of weeks in Canada.

I probably should just let it go, but I've been itching to voice my concerns/grievances in a public capacity. I usually post on a newspaper blog to do this, but most of the newspapers have unofficially declared national censorship day/week and chicken-shitted out of letting people express themselves in the form of text comments.....

Anyway......

-----WALL-O-TEXT Warning----

First concerns/grievance~

The shooter last week that attempted to take out members of parliament with a duck gun is NOT a terrorist. That is my honest opinion on the matter. While most people will paint him that color for convenience sake. I see him as a person that finally had enough with the system that serves only the 1% ( term used for laziness sake).

Not saying that what he did was right, but I can understand his anger and frustration.

Our politicians don't seem to know/care how the majority of this country has to live and constantly sends the shit down hill instead of sending it to where it belongs. I realize that it's not just Canada that is having this problem, but since it's my backyard I'll have to settle for caring for it only, for now.

If I had to summarize what is wrong with this country, people have generally lost their freedom. Taxes and fees are at an all time high in both quality and quantity. Things that never got taxed before (like tips), and have been a salvation to those that don't make a hell of a lot, are now the top tax cheat to be rooted out......

While it may seem that people are richer than their senior counterparts this could not be farther from the truth. A lot of junky things have become more affordable, but the price of necessities has skyrocketed.

Young people (and some older) are pushed into getting a higher education to “get a better job”. Leaving them in debt for a huge portion of their lives. And no real guarantee of getting better employment after all the hassle.

Poverty is something that you have to experience to understand. I'm doing pretty good right now, but I still remember what it was like to (seriously) count pennies and debate if I should break that 5....

I doubt very much that his motives where fulled by some jihad pep talk..... 

I could go on forever on this topic but I have other things to vent on.

----------------------------

Second concerns/grievance~

The next one, I normally ignore stories like these, but the Jian Ghomeshi allegations have PO'ed me for a few reasons.

First off~

The women he allegedly practiced BDSM with (to the best of my knowledge) crawled into bed with him willingly. It really should not be his fault if he preformed in a way that was not to their liking. They had the right to slap him and leave. I'm going to guess that most of them put up with it for various reasons, even if they did not like such role play.

Second~

These are not maidens that where married off after finishing high school to an abusive husband, with no chance of escape because women “belonged in the kitchen”. For all intended purposes women are able to vote and seek employment. I imagine most, if not all these women were well established older women that have been “around the block” a few times. They where not dependent on him in any way.

Third~

They took too long to report the alleged abuse! At this point it's going to be a kangaroo court with his word vs theirs. If something is important to you, you do something about it right away. You don't wait 10 years without making a claim or report and then all of a sudden say “hey I know that man! He stole my wallet 10 years ago!”.  

It's hard to tell if these women where unhappy that the playboy dumped them when he got board, or a bunch of prospectors that are grieving their rejected mining claim....

Forth~

I find the practice of firing an employee that has not been properly convicted in a legal court, incredibly disturbing. I have heard of too many horror stories like his, where the man is presumed guilty on the word of a “crying maiden”.

So to summarize~

-There is no real way to know who is telling the truth, other than taking one sides word for it. Considering Jian already made a public statement, I imagine that it's going to be hard to knock him down easily, like women typically do in these cases.

-These women where not innocent maidens that where forced to be with him though social constraints. They may have not known what they where getting into, but they had ample opportunity to put an end to it themselves! Without involving the tax payers services.....

-They waited way to long to make a report. They where not choir boys being molested the “all knowing” priest. They where adult women that are responsible for their own lives.

-This will become a he said, she said kangaroo court case that will only serve to waste tax payers money. When it could have been handled with a slap to the face and a “I'm leaving you jerk off”.

-There is nothing fundamentally wrong with BDSM.

-And finally CBC had no right to fire him without a legal conviction. Regardless of what happened.

---------------------

Third and final concerns/grievance~

It was pretty obvious that Justin Bourque was going down for some hard time, and I can't say that I disagree with the verdict......

So what's my problem then? The two (possibly more) tired “justice system”, that's what!

It's so painfully obvious that police get special treatment when it comes down to it. James Forcillo that (allegedly~) murdered the kid on the street car in Toronto, is still on the job waiting for his day in court while Bourque gets triad and sentenced in record time.

What I would love to see is WIFI body cams attached to any security or law enforcement that is allowed to openly carry restricted weapons, that would give live coverage on an open website so any member of the public could watch and be witness without bias oversight.

I could write a book on the injustice and extreme danger of police misconduct, but I already raved enough on this post.

Suffice to say, I absolutely hate injustice. And when I see a member of law enforcement get away with something that would normally send someone to jail. I see great injustice....

Now that I've cleared the air......

I'm still working on tiles in an ever so slow and steady pace.

Example 1 shows the new ground and grass tile (it's actually 3 tiles put together). I'm pretty satisfied with it compared to the other one I made (Example 2). As I was making it I realized what I could improve on, but for now it's a lot better then the last one, has a few more variations and can be tiled more dynamically. I haven't put them all into unity and tested to see if they all link up seamlessly yet, but I'm fairly confident that I've found a work flow that lets me make fairly nice seamless tiles in Blender.

Example 3 shows an example of the tile cover I made for the “ground” tile. I made more than one and will probably make a few more for comedic value and to keep things constantly “fresh”.

Example 4 is just the scaled down version of Ex 2. I made the new ground tile so that it can be used and look (reasonably) nice at its base scale.  This will save a lot of time and memory when building the stage as I'll need less tiles to make more ground.

That's it for now.

Mesh repository

When I first started modeling I made a file with a bunch of random objects.

The main idea behind this was to practice creating good looking 3D meshes, and I really learned a lot practicing like this.

The file in the image was done a while back and sadly I applied the subsurf modifier in a lot of them, making the mesh "permanently" and unnecessarily dense.

The last few days I came to realize just how useful it is having a bunch of already made meshes that you can append to a scene or tile.

So to summarize, I've started a new file with a bunch of random resources that I can use.  I'm not applying the subsurf this time so the meshes will be lighter and I can pack more objects into on layer without stressing my GPU.  This also gives me the option to use the objects as semi light weight meshes if I make a real time 3D game.

Anyway I'm still working on tiles for the current project.  I made a bunch of tiles that go in front of other tiles to give variety.  I remade The dirt/ground tile to be more module based.  Still have to make some cap tiles though and rework the bridge tile.

I'm finally back into a groove again!

How to fuck up your tile sets 101!

Oh the fun of learning with no real course material.  I thought I had it made when I inserted my latest tile set into Unity.  I quickly found out that the bridge sections I made looked a little small compared to the PC.

Part of the reason for this is I didn't plan to add more tiles and blend tiles. 

The problem I made for myself this time is I scaled down the "ground" tile sets to look more appropriate for the size of the character.  Sadly I didn't take this into consideration when I made the new set.  And I can't really set its size higher because part of the tile was to line up with the ground I made which is scaled down (I actually screwed making the texture line up also).....

I feel now think I should redo the ground tile and the new one I made.  I actually made the ground tile set some time ago and have learned a lot more since then. 

Good thing I'm not on a schedule.....

Oh and happy turkey day!

Anime binge watching is fun ^_^

Still in a lazy rut.

Since my last post I made (and still making) tile sets.  I already had some basic ground made but decided that I want a little more to make things look less redundant.  So my building as I go has sort of helped me get an idea of where I want this (stage) to go.

I've also been watching tutorials (may as well, I paid for a subscription) at work during break.  Some of it is entirely new stuff I had no real idea how to do, and some of is stuff I know how to do but learning the same workflow that professionals use is important too.  I'm watching a course on animation basics, and I wouldn't go as far as to say I was doing it wrong, but after watching a few course vids I can see what I can improve on (mainly the polish aspect).

As mentioned previously, I came up with more ideas for the current game, and decided to make a longer game sometime after finishing the short one.  So I actually started writing the dialogue that's been in my head for a while now but for some reason never wrote it down.  It's primarily going to focus on comedy, which will be interesting to see if I can pull it off, still lots of time to procastinate on it since I'm not even done with this game yet.

And in other non game dev related news.......  Been trying out all the new anime series that have come out for the fall season.  Quite a few of them are good and I'll probably stay with them.  One that caught my eye is Karen Senki.

Karen Senki in my opinion is pretty bad, and serves as a good example of what not to do ^_^ lol ok.  It's not that bad, but looks like something that I could throw together with my current skill level, and that's not good because I consider myself a noob still.  A good example of using 3D animation well would be Knights of Sidonia.  I hope I can achieve something similar down the road.... which feels pretty far off since the only thing I feel like doing after work is sitting on my hands and gluing my nose to the tv.

Anyway, I'm going to try and finish the tile set I've been working on since yesterday, no random artwork this time around.

I have been a lazy pile of poo lately.

I haven't gotten a heck of a lot done since my last post, but figured I would just post a status update anyway.

Random picture:  A Poop Slime Appears!!!!????

"Help!  Someone call a plumber!  If we attack that thing with our current weaponry and skills, things will get shitty pretty quickly!  I don't want to get feces on my shiny armor!" - The Brave Legendary Hero that supposedly defeated the Demon Lord


I have started making a (the) stage with all the tiles I've made thus far, I think I have designers block and even with all my ideas it's difficult to imagine what I should make next to populate the environment.

So far I've only had a demo stage I was using to test the resources and game mechanics.  I'll start tailoring tiles to fit the scene/stage and hopefully it will give me some inspiration.

I think I have enough.....

...Animation frames for the heroine now......  Maybe....... I'm at 4126 frames of animation for her now -_-;

What was going to be a simple short open ended platformer has become one pretty big and heavy character controller with many frames of animation.  I admit that I went a tad overboard.  But I wanted to explore how to program various moves.  I'm sure that there will be more than a couple of useless moves by the time I'm done.

So you may be thinking something like "you have over 4k frames of animation, so you must have like 100 moves right?"  Well, not really......

This is the first layer......

And these would be the 2nd (swappable) layer.....

I'm sure your dirty mind has already figured where I'm going with this.  There are actually more stages than this, but I didn't feel like posting a pic from each one.

So far I'm up to 5 attacks in the combo and a bunch of other actions for each side (most 2d platform games use one "side" and just flip the image).  So that is pretty much the reason why the heavy frame count.  There are some repeat loop frames that I could have discarded, but it would have taken more time and effort to configure in Unity, and since this is just a practice game I'm not worrying about optimizing its "weight".

This game will have high resolution sprites on a standard 512 X 512 "canvas". I'll admit It's kind of too big for what I have in mind.....  But it's always easier to scale down than up.



Now that I've finally more or less decided on a path for this game to take, I'm more confident that I won't be changing it's course at this point, so I'll give a summery of what I have planned.


-The game will be an action platformer with a clothing (or armor) destruction system.

-The armor will be the heroines health.  As well as the bosses.

-This will be manly a trash mob overrun type game, which will consist primarily of the skeleton I showed earlier.

-I'll use the same skeleton model for each of the trash mob, but will equip them differently and have them change attack patterns based on the equipment they have, to offer challenge and variety.

-Some mob's may pose a challenge and require you to think a little, but it will mostly be just mowing them down before too many gank you.

-I have plans for a mini boss half way though the stage, and a major boss at the end.

-Bosses will have set attack patterns and actually require some thought to beat.


That's pretty much it for a quick summery.

I originally wanted to make a full fledged eroge, but decided to just go along with my original thought and keep this one pretty tame, aside from the rampant nudity.  The space shooter was actually going to be a true eroge, but I shelved that project for the time being.

As for now, I'm going to take a break from trying to figure out how to script the last few actions I have to program and concentrate on some art resources.

Come to think of it, I still have to make a few other animations for the heroine, but I need to take a break from animating too.

That's it for now.

EDIT: I added a little more to the summery.

Trying to get it on!..... again....

Last week was pretty brutal.  I didn't get much done and was in a tired "I don't have the energy or enthusiasm" state of mind.

Things will be getting back to "normal" at my day job soon (hopefully).  So I should be able to get back into a routine again.

It's not really like I didn't do anything since my last post, I just feel like I was unproductive and spent a lot of time playing games and relaxing.

I did a bit of everything (programing, graphic work) since my last post.  Same track as stated previously, with no real change to mention.

No artwork today, unfortunately.  I just wanted to give a quick heads up.

Mixed Nutz: A post about random stuff

OK last post was kind of morbid.  Changing shifts on my day job hit me harder than I thought.  Now that I'm getting use to it, I'll be back on my regular shift in a few weeks. -_-;

Needles to say I haven't finished the character controller yet.  I did work on it though.  The block animation is finished and scripted now, and I fine tuned a few things and squashed a few bugs in the script and animation controller. 

-The PC would keep moving while doing the attacking animation and some animations where blending into each other when they were not suppose to. 

-The combos script worked fine but would cut the attack animations short if the attack button/key was pressed "too fast", it works properly now and the attacks stop the player until the attack is finished.

-I had it set up to the key board, but have started to focus on getting it to work with a controller.

There are still lots of movement to make graphics for and program.  But quite a bit of the movement/animation logic is pretty much done.

I bought some training videos designed to teach NPR rendering, I'll have to study them more when I have time and I feel like it.

I gave into the devils computer upgrade temptation last week and bought a-

GIGABYTE V-N770OC-4GD GeForce GTX 770 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready WindForce 3X 450W Video Card. 

Suffice to say I'm kind of broke for buying big things for a while lol.  I got it off NewEgg.ca and got a free* copy of Watch Dogs with it.

The new vid card went into my development computer, I'll use the other one in a new game comp I plan to slowly buy parts for. 

I can't say I'm overly impressed with the cards performance over the last one.  It dose render on screen graphics faster but the overall performance upgrade feeling is about a 15% - 25% difference from the other card.  With 50% more physical weight, 50% physically bigger, 50% more cost, 50% more ram and over double the CUDA cores I was hoping for at least double performance compared to the last card. 

It's still worth it if you have the extra money to get more performance.  Just note that performance gain from the same generation of GeForce cards won't be all that spectacular, at lest from a casual development perspective.

Random Artwork: For this post I decided to model a necklace with the logo on Aiden Pearce's hat.  I don' really feel that it came out all that great, but meh.

Watch Dogs came with the card I bought.  Sadly it came as a digital download.  Someone like me that predates the Nintendo generation was kind of disappointing that I didn't get a CD.  And I had to sign up for Ubi play or whatever the fuck it was called before I could even download it.....  

 

Getting this reminded me why I hate big studio games (companies), or at lest the methods they use to vend and keep control over.  Makes you think that sometime in the future they will want a stool, blood and urine sample, CAT scan and have multiple background checks to make sure your not going to share their game before you can buy.

The game is well done, there are a few nit picky areas that I notice could have used some improvement.  The gameplay style reminds me of GTA with Metal Gear tactical action.

It'll probably keep my attention for a month if I'm lucky.

Still working on my game though, mostly rendering animation frames right now.

Tired short update....

Still working on the PC character controller.  Not much progress since last post.  Finished attack animation I was working on last time.  Working on a block animation now.

Wow.... I just realized how pointless this blog entry was lol.  Anyway I thought I would do a weekly update, but I probably won't update for a while since work is taking most of my hobby time.  I think I'll wait until I finish the PC character controller and animations before my next post.

Unless I feel like posting again......

RANDOM PICTURE: You can start your quest now!

Was running pretty fast until I hit that muddy patch -_-;

As mentioned in my last post, work has been taking a fair bit of time away from productivity.  I did manage to finish and program the run cycle and I just finished rendering the frames for the 3ed attack in the players combo.

 Note:This picture has nothing to do with the current project

So I have at least 3 more attack sequences that I have in my head and still have to animate.  I "need" to make a crouching animation and an attack sequence for crouching.  Then there is the shield, doge and some other things I have to re look over my notes for. 

Made a couple of props but still have to get to work on making more.

My compositing skills kind of suck still, so I'm considering buying some training vids that specifically cover NPR.

About the picture: This is one of my earlier models for a character I devised.  The topology is actually not that bad, but it lacks the manga/anime effect I was going for.  I made several advancements in learning 3D modeling since I made this.  she's a character for another game that I have in my head but haven't gotten around to working on.  I'll have to do a complete overhaul on her when I finally get around to this idea.  I sort of prettied up the materials and just took this shot.  The reason its here is just so my blog post don't seem so bland.

Bug Beat Down.

Welp...  Work is as boring as I remember it.  No real choice though, I need to feed myself, pay bills, buy computer stuff.....  At least my ear infection is almost gone....  Anyway I'm sure you didn't come here to hear me complain about my day job.

I had a problem with the character controller setup until recently.  The player would be sluggish when changing directions and moonwalk at some points.  I thought that it was a problem with my lame and un-elite scripting techniques.  It was actually a few simple problem with the character controller I made.  I forgot to link a direct transition between both walk cycles.  The issues with the moon walking was caused by the character controller trying to get from two idle states to the next walk state.  Simple, but when your head is filled with rocks everything is painful to learn.

 Another problem I was having was with picking up the loot bag drop.  I couldn't get the character to pick up every bag in the scene, it would only pick up one at a time.  I was working on an ambient prop automation script yesterday to animate some of the static scenery.  While I was testing this I kept getting errors about the loot bag after about a minute into the testing phase.  I then remembered that I added a clean up script that removes things like monster drops in a designated time span. 

It took me a while for the rocks in my head to finally move, but I realized that Unity was complaining because it was trying to find a component that was no longer in the scene.  After referring to the Unity 2D demo project scripts, I finally realized that I should be putting the OnTrigger event in the bag script itself.

It works as intended now.....  And I feel kind of stupid for missing something simple.  On the other hand, I'm happy that I finally figured it out.

So I squashed two annoying bugs yesterday.  Currently rendering a run cycle for the pc.  It's going to take a while because of the number of frames is pretty high (19 per layer).  I want to have a combo system for the attacks, so I have to work on that some point next.  I found several reference scripts on the subject, so I don't think I'll run into any issues.

Goodbye vacation 2014, Happy Canada Day, goddamn ear infection, more sprites more scripting.....

So it's the last day of my vacation (well technically it's a statutory holiday, but we wont get into details).

My ear infection is going down but it's still sore a bit.

Happy Canada day if you live in Canada and or celebrate Canada day.  I don't really celebrate it, but I'm enjoying the extra day off work.

I've been rendering sprites for the heroine at a steady pace.  So far I have 1200 + frames of animation and I still need to render quite a bit more.  Then there are the other character and enemies I need to do.

Programming in Unity is going along fine, as posted previously I'm mostly working on the character controller.  I'm also scripting power up collecting and spawning.  Basically slowly adding game logic to the junk I have in the game.

That's pretty much it.  Work starts again tomorrow so I won't have as much time to work on the game.  I'm pretty happy with what I got done.... Still, I would have loved to have more time to work on it......

Scripting, configuring and assets

Despite an infected right ear canal I've been getting quite a bit done on the last few days of my vacation.

I finally got down into scripting and surprisingly I'm doing pretty good.  If I had to use RPG terms to describe my base skills when I first started game development, it would look something like this.

Art:             lvl -10
Music:         lvl - 5
Programing: lvl - -15 (yes negative -_-;)

Scripting was probably one of the biggest hurdles that I felt would be a trial to overcome.  It's actually not as bad as I thought.  I used the camera follow script that came with the Unity 2D demo project as a template and started with that.

Naturally I want the camera to do more than what was in the script, so I went to work and modified it to go in front of the character slightly and when she double jumps it tracks upward movement.  I was surprised at how I actually solved most of the issues on my own, sometimes with a little research.  I'm slowly adding variables to the 2D character controller script and expanding the range of mobility options.

I didn't realize how much of all the free scripting courses I absorbed until today.  I'm still way off from becoming proficient, but it's a start.

I'm currently just working on the heroine (I still have to look for a name for her).  I'm almost finished the animations for the first attack and then I want to make some special animations for the double jump.  I'll keep animating and rendering frames for (hopefully) all the ideas I want to implement with her.

I was going to work on the GUI but Unity announced that this summer its getting a face lift and I have to say I looks a lot easier to work with than the current one they have.  I have lots of other things to keep me busy in the meantime.

I still need a fair bit of art assets for props and platforms.  As you can see in the screenshot there is just some ground and grass.  I was trying to work on other resources while Blender was rendering animation frames, but having more than one instance of Blender open was causing issues at certain times.  One of the main reasons I've started putting what I have together in Unity.

That's Pretty much it for now.

EDIT: I've changed and updated the "Current Projects" page.

Using what I have

Just a quick update.

I finished the basic walk cycle sprites and the idle sprites and imported them into Unity.

I still have to make and render a jump cycle and at least one attack cycle.  In the meantime, I'll start learning scripting staring with a character controller and move on form there.

Rendering sprites

It's taking longer than I thought it would to render the sprites.  Yesterday I had to do a few things and it took most of the day. Unfortunately I did not have any animation clips set up to be rendered so I feel like I wasted time that could have been used to render a sprite loop.

There are a few touchy things that I'm starting to notice now on the heroine that I want to fix.  But I've already taken so much time already on tweaking and want to start learning programming with my own resources.  It's mostly picky stuff anyway and I'm sure most people won't really or even care to take notice.

One of the reasons its taking so long to render her is because of the sheer number of frames necessary for what I have in mind.  One action, like idle, has 9 frames of animation.  This technically isn't a lot, but I have so many multiple variation layers. And instead of flipping the animation to reuse the same "direction" like many side scrollers do, I'll be using a sprite setup with two unique side views. 

I just realized that this may sound a little confusing to some, so I'll explain it this way.  Lets say you have a knight with a sword and shield.  Usually game developers will only make one "side" and the sword or shield will always be facing the player.  This is done to save time and money.  I understand that most people don't really care or even notice.  But I honestly think it would be a crying shame to go though all the trouble of making and rigging a 3D model for the purpose of rendering sprites, and not bother to use two unique sides.

This pic is epically shabby.......

Being lazy

Not entirely accurate.  I did make a sword prop today and put together a scene for fun and practice.

Unfortunately the freestyle computations where taking too long so I just canceled the render.  Not a big loss, I wasn't entirely happy with my crappy texture job on parts of it.  I may go back and redo and render it in sections so I can put them together in gimp.  Processing billions of faces in one scene just seemed to overwhelm the freestyle engine.

Ive finally finished the heroine that I've been "power rigging" for the past week.  I realized that I forgot to rig her necklace after my last post.  It was interesting learning how to use spline IK.  I still hate working with bezier curves, but making shapekeys for believable necklace chain would have been unreasonable.... Well maybe not....  At least its dynamic now.

Ive made a set of renders showing her a various angles to commemorate finishing this character.

I rigged the hair with shapekeys.  I could have just made a cloth or soft body simulation, but doing this would have made render times even more painful.  And I would not have the same degree of control.  I just used proportional editing and fine tweaked a bit.  Subsurf makes the transition look smooth enough.

I'm sure that I can tweak more later, but what I have is good enough.  There is a point where you have to say "its done!"

So tomorrow I'm going to start making animation clips for her and see how many rendered frames I can make.  After that I'll get back into Unity and beat my head on the keyboard until I learn scripting.... Or some scripting at lest.....

After that, I guess I need to make more character(s) and finish the witch.

Short Status Update

So I managed to make a few emote shapekeys.  I'll probably make more if I continue the game, after it's done.  Funny thing how imagination works.  I originally started out with just a simple one stage game in mind that would be left open ended, and now I have a whole plot in my head with a whole cast of characters.

My current goal hasn't really changed though.  I still plan to make a single stage open ended platformer to start with, but its nice to have more material to work with if/when I decide to continue it.

Anyway.....

I also shapkeyed and rigged the wings on her breastplate and grieves.  I plan to use these animations to show special actions like double jump, glide, power charge so on~

The under armor is shapekeyed also and conforms properly.  I cheated quite a bit using masks to hide the skin on covered areas.  I managed to mask most of the hip area and only had to tweak a few of the corrective shapekeys on  the body mesh.  I couldn't get away with just weighting for the hip area, so I had to make a few corrective shapekeys to make it look pleasing.  Thankfully I didn't have to make any new bones, the drivers used the existing ones on the body mesh just fine.

I still have the rig to hair.  I don't really need to I guess, but I want to =)

I'm sure there are a few other things I'll tweak, but the majority has been done.

Of walk cycles and shape keys.

So its finally done, after months of procrastination I finally rigged the heroine with corrective shape keys.

There are so many things wrong with this walk cycle and render that I'm not even going to try and list them.  This, however was just a test of sorts to see how the new automated shape keys worked in an animation context (also I was so giddy to see this model in action after being on the back burner for so long).  Needless to say, this is not going to be in the game.

So what's left?  I still need to make emote shape keys, hair motion shape keys and the mesh in-between some of the armor joints needs to be rigged and I have to decide what I'm going to do for a texture/color.

I'll probably make a mask(s) for some of the skin under the joints I can get away with it.  I wont be able to get away with the hip area.  If you look closely at her rear you'll notice there is a fairly big "hole" in her pants.  The armor was designed with many concepts that I wanted to implement.  Mobility was a major factor in its design.  Other factors like eroticism and dangerous where also implemented.

To summarize (more like clarify) I can't get away with using a mask for the ass area.  The vertex layout is completely different for the armored pants.  So I'll have to rig the under-armor to make sure it stays on top of the "skin".  I already have corrective shape key bones set up on the body mesh, so I should be able to just copy and edit the names a bit.

I imagine I'll have to tweak as I go along, but over all she is coming along nicely.  Being on vacation has helped me a lot in terms of having the time to keep going at it.  Not to mention I don't have to spend all my energy at work.

Absolutely nothing to do with game development: A la politicia (Ontario 2014 election)

So today was the big day in Ontario.  All the people that wanted a job that pays a full pension after 5 or so years of "work" came out to woo and aww people into voting them in.

I have personally had my fill with the current state of affairs.  I realize some politicians are trying to do good, but many of them don't seem entirely motivated at trying new things, and seem more inclined to just win votes.

For years I wanted a way to vote "none of the above".  Due to my lack of enthusiasm and the fact that elections Canada doesn't seem all that keen on telling voters that they can decline their vote, so I pretty much hit a wall looking for answers.  Sadly I had to find out the answer to my question in a new paper article.

This election more than ever, I wanted to vote "none of the above".

In one corner we have (Mc)Wynne who wants to keep shuffling the cards to make it look like they are doing something when in fact they are not.  I like libertarian ideas and feel that they are the way of the future.  But when you have a complete disrespect for others hard work (ie: money), I can't seem to take you seriously. Sorry Wynne, but you lost your libertarian stance a long time ago.

I use to be an NDP fan.  Jack was a nice guy and had the charisma.  Can't say I would agree with all the stuff that stood for, but I did respect his idea of change.  Unfortunately the NDP seem to have stopped preaching these ideals.  Horwath's plan just came off as being a "liberal lite" plan and didn't have the kind of change that I was hoping for.

Despite dim Tim's "I'ma gonna fire all you azzes" attitude, I actually appreciated his platform the most.  At least the man (sounds like) is being honest, and I really respect that out of anyone.  Unfortunately I don't like Harpers far right agenda when it comes to making marijuana "completely" illegal and replacing unconstitutional prostitution laws with other unconstitutional prostitution laws.  Sometimes I feel like the man is just trying to make crime....  I realize that dim Tim is Provencal and Harpo is Federal.  But I still can't see myself supporting such nonsense even in spirit...

The green party?  Well I have just reached my limit so unfortunately they and other no name parties are going to have to suffer for it.

What I was hoping for this election was talk about major change, such as binging up unfair and expensive taxation and at least offering alternative ideas.  But we only get minor tweaks and crap this election.  I feel that the current system is just too outdated and in major need of an overhaul.  That's one of the things I liked about Tim's platform, at lest he was talking about changing some parts of the broken system.  I think that his agenda was a little to abrasive though.  He should have presented other alternatives and modernizations to the current system to make a softer and more effective impact.

Anyway I just ended up declining my vote.  When the political parties talk about actually fixing, modernizing and stop being partisan idiots I'll consider gracing them with my vote again.

EDIT:For those of you that don't know.  Declining your vote is (supposedly) different from spoiling your ballot.  The votes that are declined are suppose to be kept separate and counted as votes that could have been, but weren't.  Basically saying that I have come to vote, but none of you are worthy of it.

I realize that I'm just a single customer in a "sea food" restraint ordering a "cheese burger".  However I honestly feel if enough people order that "cheese burger" the sea food restaurant will take a hint.

EDIT: various spelling errors fixed

EDIT: June 14 2014- added a note about declining votes.

Vacation 2014 START!

So its finally here.  I'm off work for the next 3 weeks.

I haven't really worked much on the game since my last post.  The heroine needs so many corrective shape keys its not funny.  As I'm sure I mentioned, I could animate as is with the weighting job.  However shes going to be doing several "extreme" poses and shape keys will be necessary to make sure the mesh doesn't deform like crap.

I redid my mascot/avatar a couple of days ago for practice and a change of pace.

So anyway, my vacation will primarily be dedicated to furthering my game dev skills and resources.

That's all for now.

Ulgh....

Last week I food poisoned myself with a very old beer (about3-4 yrs old).  This wasn't too bad once I threw it up and got some rest.

The weather got cooler on Saturday and then my sinuses got infected/irritated which put me on my ass again. and I still feel a little crappy even today.

Despite this double whammy, I did manage to learn some things that where eluding me in the node editor.

I'll admit the lighting needs a better setup and the skin material could use a little less glossiness.  The eyes however where pretty much what I was going for.

I had a bit of trouble getting the stencil to work for the half moon under the center, but managed to find an old tutorial on the internet that indirectly solved my problem.

Still looking forward to my vacation...

Vacation starting in T minus 3 weeks....

So Ive finally got down to it and started learning about the compositor in Blender.  The compositor controls colors and other visual effects by linking various nodes, to over simplify what it dose.

I want to get familiar with this especially for the eyes of my characters.  The previous technique I used was to just layer shrink-warped objects.  This worked alright, but could cause a problem on complex color layouts and ultimately limits my options.  It also doesn't provide the same amount of control in blending colors.

I could just go the easy rout and UV unwrap, put a texture on it.  But this method could cause problems if the resolution gets changed.  There is also the "real time" control factor to consider.  If I learn to use the compositor, then it's going to be useful for at least one of the ideas I have.  Some nodes can even be animated.

So in a nut shell, I'm going to be devoting time to learning composting on my vacation.


My next step to learn, which is also part of the compositor, is how to render in a "flat" anime style.  I found a video on youtube the other day that actually gives some really good tips on material/node setup and lighting setup. 

The recent renders I did are not too bad, but I feel I can do better.  I've seen some 3D models that were so well rendered, it was pretty hard to tell them apart from traditional 2D drawings.  So that's another goal I want to work to.  Since I'm going through the trouble of making fully animate-able models, it would be a sin not to make some anime cut scenes in my games eventually.

Mecha Shield Crafting 101

So I finally got the pro version of Unity and felt rich enough to get RPG maker Ace.  Needless to say I'm kind of broke.....  Mind you, if you consider some peoples hobbies, smoking and heavy drinking come to mind, it's not really that much.

RPG maker is nice for fun stuff.  I'm probably not going to use it for most of the ideas I have due to its obvious limitations.  I'm sure that I can think up some simple RPG ideas to get a game going.  I'll probably be getting or making more tile sets for it though, the ones included are very basic.  I'll probably make the most use of RPG maker when I need a breather from the usual fare.

I plan to get back into Unity when I have the heroins sprites done.  Then I'll work with the animation system and character controller scripts.  Then I'll move on to learning about scripting basic game logic and go on from there.

I finished the heroins weighting some time ago and decided to rework her "solid" armor parts and gear for a change of pace.  The weighting went well, but I still need to make corrective shape keys and emote shape keys.  I plan to get better at using the compositor also, so I can redo the eyes and make them a bit better.  Work is going fairly smoothly to say the least, considering how much time I have to fool around between work and chores.

While I was doing the gear I decided to redesign the shield.  As you saw in a earlier post, the shield had blades sticking out of the sides.  This was done because I plan to have the heroin use her shield for attacking, possibly in a combo.  I felt the blades looked a little flimsy and not very intimidating.  So I went back to the "drawing board".


This was version 2 that I came up with

It defiantly had that aggressive, battle ready  look I was going for, but the design was a little too wide and I kind of wanted the basic subtle look also.  So I was torn between two ideas that I wanted to implement.  A shield with sharp edges for slashing, but with bluntness for bashing also....  So I decided to go both routs!

I completely scraped the original, and sort of used the base as a starting point for a new shield design.  This is the design concept I came up with

The idea was to make a mecha blade shield that housed the blades when not in use.  This design was nice, but the blades where a little too big and I wasn't confident in my skills as a rigger to make this idea happen.  It did however give me the insight for the final model that I actually had in mind.

The blades aren't as big and impressive as the previous designs, but the shield turned out fairly mechanically correct.  The blades fold away nicely into the shield.  I also added hinges and pistons for the hatches to give a more believable look.  I learned a lot making this.  I had never rigged pistons before, but once I caught on to a couple of things I was doing wrong, everything fell into place.  I'm thinking of re editing the center side blades, I feel that I went a little overboard putting holes in the blades.  Overall I'm happy with this design and the way it turned out.  The stuff I learned while doing this will help me with a lot of other mecha/steam punk ideas I have floating around in my head.

I'll try and edit this post later and add a youtube vid showing the blades folding inside the shield and deploying again.  Rendering all the junk this shield has takes forever, especially the freestyle calculations.

EDIT: Here is the link for the youtube vid

Also some minor spelling and grammar corrections.

  

A simple and boring update on the long week.

Nothing really special to report.  Ive finished re-topologising the heroin, and I'm currently weighting and  readjusting parts of the mesh.

Weighting is so boring and tedious, but I'll try to get it done this long week.

I used my head this time and will weight and edit the mesh before making the cloths.  One of the problems that I had with the previous meshes I made is that I jumped into making the cloths before weighting and rigging. 

This technically isn't really an issue for someone that knows what they are doing and has a lot of practice and esperence, however, since I'm still relativity new to modeling and rigging I often make mistakes and have to correct them, these are often noticed as I'm weighting each vertex. 

Since I'm not going to use a mask for under clothing skin, I have to make sure that the mesh is in its final form, or suffer clipping problems later on.  I considered using a mask, but the heroin doesn't have that much skin that is actually covered :D. So I felt it was kind of pointless.

I'm also thinking strongly on getting RPG Maker VX Ace.  I don't plan to use this to make some of the really elaborate ideas I have, but it would be nice to prototype ideas, and possibly make some "cheap" and "fast" games.

I'll wait till I have a Unity pro license first though.  Even though I don't have any commercial game plan yet, I kind of want to get one before the Canadian dollar falls anymore and have to pay a fortune in conversion costs.  The good thing is that I'll be pre-ordering Unity 5 in the same time.  Since Unity announced Unity version 5, anyone that buys a Unity 4.x license now will get Unity 5 on release.

I'll see how much I have left after tax and conversion, before I decide to get RPG maker.  It dose sound like a fun program though..... 

Oh ya? OUYA!

It's been a very sleepy week, mother nature doesn't seem to know what temperature to put the heat at.  As a result the weather has been cold and frozen-soggy.  I haven't  really had the energy to do much.

I finally purchased an OUYA off amazon.ca.  It's that small android game console that had a really successful kick starter campaign last year.

I haven't really played it that much but some of the woes that people where complaining about are in fact true.

The out of box controller isn't all that great, its kind of flimsy and tends to loose its signal every so often.  This isn't really a major problem since I heard you can use pretty much any USB direct x compatible controller in it's place, haven't tried it out myself though, I pretty much need a USB hub since there is only one USB port on the system.

I have only tried a few games, but the trend is pretty much what people have been saying, most of the games on it where designed for mobile gaming.  Translation, they where designed for a small screen with no controller.

Despite these obvious flaws I'm still interested in making games for this little system.  Not having all the expensive bullshit that the other major consoles have, makes it worth while to at least look into the possibility of developing for it.  I think that this console will shine if it can get more games designed for a big screen & controller.

Unfortunately I imagine this is going to take a while.  Making a good quality game takes time to learn the necessary skills and practice them until you get good enough to use them in a production setting.

With this poor economy the already established game developers, I figure are leery about changing course into unknown waters.  A lot of developers that go though the rigorous (and sometimes expensive) training process prefer to go the major 3 systems/mobile gaming rout, or at lest I assume so.

I'm in a position where I don't mind taking a chance, however because I have a full time job and the economy is so crappy I don't want to take a chance on taking a job with less hours, so I only have so much time to invest into game development.  This problem is probably persistent for more than just me.

Also the evolution of video game consumption is veering more towards hand held.

I blame this trend almost entirely on the economy as well.  If you figure that anyone getting out of high school  is either going to have to get a crappy wage Mc Job or end up in university/collage, I figure these people don't really have the time to sit around at home and play games.

The older generation loves to bitch about the younger generation using all the gadgets to talk to one another, but seem to forget that back when they where young gasoline was  0.05 cents the liter, you could get a reasonable home with just a crappy Mc Job and only one person had to work to support a family....

So to summarize, the OUYA has some pretty big hurdles.

In other news, I decided to retopologize the heroin.  Yes, I know I did this before....  I'm still learning though and I guess you could consider this the wax on wax off method of learning 3d modeling.

I was trying to avoid doing a complete retopology because now I'll have to remake/refit several pieces of her armor.  Mind you that's probably not a bad thing.  My skills have improved quite a bit since I made it and it also gives me an excuse to redesign parts of it.

That's it that's all.

EDIT: removed some redundancy and broke some larger paragraphs into smaller ones.

EDIT Again:  Some spelling and other stuff corrected/clarified -_-;

Main screen turn on!

Got my new PSU A couple of days back, I was so shocked when the Purolator guy showed up.  I said "holy shit I ordered that yesterday!".  Newegg doesn't appear to have free shipping like Amazon or other big online shops, but their regular shipping is really fast, no need to pay for express shipping lol.  Dev comp is back online and sounds a lot better.

A problem with Blender rigging that had been hounding me for months now I finally overcame.  I asked around and people tried to help me, unfortunately they didn't have any advice I didn't know already.  I looked around and found various tutorials that had what I was looking for but the topics where so old that they didn't seem to apply to the latest version of Blender and the help/demo files where often broken.  The problem was rigging corrective shape keys to auto deform the mesh when the bone changes position.  Surprisingly simple but so complicated when you don't even know where to start.....

So I finally broke down and bought a training vid from cmiVFX called massive mammoth masterclass V2 by Nathan Negdahl  (he's the dude that made the human metarig in Blender, not to mention a whole slew of other projects he took part in). 

Not that I mind spending money to learn something new, but $60 (after all the tax and conversion) isn't exactly cheep for someone that just dose this for a hobby with no real commercial game plan.  Suffice to say I was a tad worried that I would just end up running into a road bock like with all the other resources I found on the net, and the money would pretty much be spend on a training topic that I didn't entirely need to solve my current problem.

Anyway everything is good, I shouldn't doubt Natha's training vids because they are always awesome, and full of really good information, that he presents really well.  I'll look through the rest of the vid when I have time, I'm sure I'll learn a lot more than I already do about weighting and other topics covered in the vid.

I plan to continue work on the heroin that I've neglected up till now due to the shape key issue (I have standards dammit!).  My life is still pretty busy with problems I have to address, but all is well.

PSU F U POS

Looks like the only thing I didn't buy new for my dev computer is now going the way of the doe doe.....  Such is life... It's only money -_-*......  Getting a new Corsair 850 that's 80 gold certified.  I can probably still work on my dev computer but it shuts down at random when the PSU overheats.  Problem may not be the PSU but its the usual culprit in these cases, I can always use another PSU if it isn't that anyway.

Other than that, haven't had much time to work on my game.  I spent a few hours the last few days getting some skeleton animations in the game.  I learned a kewl new trick in unity on how to apply layers to game characters (objects) that need other frames of animation to sync up with the main sprite body.  This is actually very important for the game I have in mind, and works a lot better than the prototype workaround I originally devised.

Was working on some props, ground texture and grass object when the PSU started it's grievance.  Most of the important stuff got saved though.

Little by little it will get done....  Probably will just stay on my game machine and do tut's while I wait for Newegg to ship my new PSU.

Blender 2.70 is AWESOME!

Even though Blender 2.70 is not officially released yet, I got to try out a test build.

The freestyle component in the later versions of Blender had major problems handling mesh data that exceeded 30 or so thousand polys (my characters are around 2 million +).  Needless to say it never rendered the characters fully and crashed the program.

With the latest build though I heard that freestyle had its code reworked, and now it works like a charm!  Still takes a long time to render.  But the results are worth it!

Just in case your not familiar with freestyle, to put it simply it draws lines around the character silhouette and other areas that may be defined by the user.  It's pretty much essential to get that traditional anime look on your rendered models.

This is an older version of the Heroin that I'm still trying to find the time to finish.  Some of the gear has been changed around a bit.  The purpose of  this scene and setup was just a quick test I did to check proportions and see how well the character moved with the equipment I made pretty much entirely from imagination.  And how it would look in a setting.  Some of the parts are messed up, most notably on the inner thigh where the under-armor clips though the leg.

I could have done one with the more recent modification but I just wanted to benchmark the new freestyle code myself.  And I have to say I'm impressed!  


EDIT:Some minor grammatical corrections.       

New Dev Comp

Last week I dropped a few coinz on a new desktop.  Last one I had wasn't bad but felt like just going a bit higher.  The 8 core AMD Is really a step up from the i5 and I have more ram to work with.  Also got one of the new nividia card models based on the new Maxwell architecture, it's a slight improvement over the Radeon I had in the other system.

Been doing tutorials in Unity again and working on enemies in Blender.  I also have to spend some time working on "ground" and props.  I'll probably spend some time learning more about the compositor in Blender this week if all goes well and I don't get swamped with chores.


New Dev Comp specs if anyone is interested in techno garble.

Vid card    -   Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2 GB
Processor -   AMD FX Vishera 4.00GHz
Ram         -   G. Skill RipJaws X series 16GB
Case        -    Corsair Carbide Series 500R Black Steel structure
Mother     -    GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3P AM3+/AM3 AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s
HD          -     Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache
CD          -     ASUS 24X DVD Burner - Bulk 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X
PWR       -     Corsair 750W (Ripped it out of the other comp)
OS          -     Win 7

Just Wanted to share

Just finished the animation for the skeleton falling and getting up.  It's my first animation that moves a character to this extent.  It's 200 frames long (or 199 if you don't count the double start frame).

The start is kind of sluggish on the gif, but it doesn't really matter since the final animation speed will be set in Unity.

Ho Hum.... Happy Family day if you live in Canada.

The winter finally got to me.  Production has been slowed down a fair bit as my stamina gets depleted faster (I still have a full time job to do).

Thankfully the winter is almost over (I hope).  Since I have 3 days off I got a fair amount of work done along with relaxing.

I've been working on this enemy on the long weekend.  The quality is a lot better than the above gif, I just wanted to make it lean for this blog, it would have been 64 megs if I didn't optimize it!  Gimp kind of botched it a bit, but its still good enough to give you an idea on whats happening.

I'm making separate layers to use in Unity that will "go over" this character, such as sword and shield possibly armor in the future too.  This will take less memory and cut render times down during the creating phase.   Its sort of like the paper doll concept.

After I have enough animations for this skeleton, I think I'm going to work on game mechanics next.  Since I'm still learning it's a good idea to just try it out.  I haven't really touched the animation category in Blender until I made this skeleton, I screwed up quite a few times until I got an idea what I was suppose to do.  So I want to go ahead and screw up with the game mechanics and make mistakes now on a simple character then on hard to manage, like the heroin.

As for the witch and heroin I showed last time I kind of put them on the back burner ^_^; Characters with "meat" on them are kind of harder to make look good during animation.  Still running into a few issues that I'll have to research on how to solve when I have time (and patience).

That's pretty much it for now, anything else I've done was more or less tutorial stuff and not really worth mentioning.


EDIT: Ignore the 64 megs part, Gimp was messing with my head.