GameDev – Seite 2 – dasparadoxon gaming blog

Make some noise (with your feet) (InterAction Project Status Update)

The InterAction Project has two different kinds of Player steering modes : One for Adventure-like games and one that is more the classic FPS steering. But despite which is used : You probably need footsteps.

The character controller I am writing for the InterAction Project (which of course does not have to be used) makes use of a set of components that provide foot step sounds, depending on the material the player is walking on.

For now it is supporting only meshes, but the terrain support is nearly done.

If you want to have foot steps while moving on a surface, you simply assign a FeetSoundMaterial component to it. Then you can assing multiple footstep sounds to this Material. Everything else is done by the FeetSoundManager component attached to the player.

The feet sound manager casts a ray down to the surface and retrieves the FeetSoundMaterial. It then takes the AudioClip[] array it gets from the FeetSoundMaterial and plays a random footstep sound IF no other footstep is playing.

Of course this could be done much better. Like a library of footsteps groups and then using the mesh material to select which group to use, just as an example.

But for now this works fine. 😀

[InterAction Project] Quest Nodes and FlagDependentObstacles

After hardening the whole system and capseling it into its own project, I can move on with other needed functionalites for it. Ah yes, also I versioned it with git, since my ultimate goal is it, to publish InterAction System on GitHub.

I needed for my adventure game the Quest Nodes and obstacles. The Quest Nodes (you could also call them location triggers) were allready in places, but not using the Flag System.

A QuestNode is a box collider set to a trigger, that, for now plays a sound and shows a message, optionally depending on flag settings.

A FlagDependent Obstacle is basicly the same, but instead of triggern it blocks passage depending on flags.

More about Actionable Objects. ( InterAction Project Series )

Let’s have a look how this little system I am doing enables the player to open and close this power block door, as a simple example.

The orange door you see in the scene view in the picture above has a component called ActionableObject. If the layer „ActionableObjects“ exists, a GameObject with this component on it will be set to this layer. This is needed because the raytracing of the EyeModule only hits on objects in this layer. (If the layer does not exist, errors will be thrown, but there is a convient editor menu where you can create all needed layers without having to add them manually.)

New : My (hopefully) weekly Unity3D news and thoughts

Dear diary. Hmm. No. But : I try to do a weekly series of, well, news and thoughts about, around and for Unity3D and stuff for it.

Unity 2020.1 is out. A lot of neat new features. Like editing Prefabs inside a level. Heres a t wo minute video from them showing some of(f) the new things.

Now let me talk a bit about some assets I recommend or at least use them myself or will use them myself.

Re-Usability or what was that about the Wheel ? (just a few thoughts)

I decided to use the preview animation rigging package from Unity. After a few problems with importing the rigged Blender models as FBX I could easily use this quite good package. (Mainly MakeHuman screwed the scaling, but thats for another time)

I started a small new project to practice the use of it. And while doing that I also decided to export my game system for the main project I am currently working on, which I described in the previous articles a bit.

When you do something like this, you can easily see how reusable and how independed it is from the project you first implemented it in.

Rigging or Scripting – that is here the question.

My character is holding a flashlight. But I also have two animations in the animation controller running. One for the idle animation or walking in one layer, and one for the hand actions in another layer, seperated by a layer mask.

Not really a quest system (yet), rather a basic interaction system. #4

So this is growing, but its now a fully functional interaction system. The player (or other entities soon) can see objects they can interact with and get a menu that builds itself from the actions they can perform on that object.

This is not as flexible as I want it to be at all, yet. But I have to make a comprimise between getting it done and make it perfectly reusable.

Being seen is half the battle – a (very simple) Quest-System for Unity (#3)

This is the system now that makes it possible for the Actionable Object to track if its seen or not seen. Now it can give the Game System (ControllerGameScene in this case) all the actions or informations that the game system needs to present the player choices or possible actions. This will be done via a UI menu or hotkeys.

A (very basic) Quest/Environment System for Unity (ongoing) #1

Questnodes

Questnodes are the trigger elements. They work closly together with the Game Scene Controller. After being triggerd once, a Questnode deactivates itself, if multipleTriggering is not set to true. If it is set to true, the Questnode will trigger again if the player leaves and enteres the trigger collider again.

Lara, wheres the croft

So I played Rise of the Tomb Raider from 2015.

I was not a big fan of the Croft franchise, ever. But this game taught me quite a lot about puzzle making and the development of open world games since 2015, as did the Assassins Creed franchise. Funny, that they mostly all use exact the same mechanism, but the puzzle thing is where Croft scores.

Also this combination of micro-movie sequences and gameplay was interesting.

I now tested the trial version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider from 2018, most settings to Ultra. And wow, the graphics f*cked my brain.

Also and that is interesting, the facial expressions of the modern Lara are not as good as in the 2015 version, by far.