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[0x00000000]

Gravinauts

Alternate title : Why do quaternions hate me so much?

Last update post : New planets

Previous updates :
Charging rockets
DOMINATING!
Twinkle twinkle little star

Gravinauts is a 3rd person shooter with planetary physics, jetpacks, grappling hooks and rocket jumping. Multiplayer only (even if I haven't done multiplayer code yet). It will include the classic arena shooter game types : DM/TDM, CTF and Domination (from UT99).

Right now it's in early development, but the core gameplay is present. So, what's in it?

Planetary physics

By that I mean local gravity, with small planets that you can jump to and from. Super Mario Galaxy is the famous example of this mechanic. Except here it's a shooter.
I'm just using the universal law of gravitation, but aligning the player correctly was the hard part, not calculating gravity.


Gravity will also modify the path a projectile will take when you fire it, but the aiming reticle shows you the path your shot will take in advance.
See

for an example of shooting around a black hole.

Grappling hook

It helps you slingshot around small planets or correct your trajectory.

Jetpack
The jetpack helps you adjust your trajectory or escape a planet's gravity well, and when combined with the hook lets you do fancy things without even touching the ground :



And of course there are the weapons, which are functional but not done yet.

Important detail : the main character is supposed to be as astronaut. But I haven't finished the model yet. Or implemented skeletal animation in the engine.
I'm very much behind on the art front here.

I want to see if there's any interest for this kind of game, or if you have ideas, suggestions or anything.

[sonjool]

It looks pretty cool. I'm getting a bit of bionic commando vibe from it due to all the slinging around haha.

Are you planning to have weapon variations?

[rosholger]

looks cool! i like that the bullets are affected by gravity, feels like it that will add a lot of depth to the game.

[0x00000000]

It looks pretty cool. I'm getting a bit of bionic commando vibe from it due to all the slinging around haha.

Are you planning to have weapon variations?

Not sure what you mean by that, the weapons will be fairly standard and the players have to pick them up in the map.
The weapons have 2 special qualities :
_ No hitscan, the sniper is just very fast and technically can be dodged.
_ Projectiles are affected by gravity, except for the superweapon.

I'll update later today to show that superweapon when I'm finished updating it. It's called the Black Hole Generator. Guess what it does.

[0x00000000]

So, the Black Hole Generator



It's the superweapon, and it makes black holes. Temporary ones. Black holes kill instantly when you touch their event horizon, and their mass is disproportionate to their size (not as much as in reality of course).



. Youtube seems to not like xvid at all though and completely murders the video quality though :/. I have to find better encoding.

I still have to add some protections, like not being able to spawn one on your own flag so no one can touch it and things like that.

[Ashkin]

I like the idea of this. I think you should look at Worms for inspiration- I'm sure you could instill the frenetic gameplay it manages in a realtime battle.

[gimymblert]

Hou! I'm making something vaguely similar, alignment was indeed a bitch, especially when you try a relative cam camera. Great work!

[sonjool]

It looks pretty cool. I'm getting a bit of bionic commando vibe from it due to all the slinging around haha.

Are you planning to have weapon variations?

Not sure what you mean by that, the weapons will be fairly standard and the players have to pick them up in the map.
The weapons have 2 special qualities :
_ No hitscan, the sniper is just very fast and technically can be dodged.
_ Projectiles are affected by gravity, except for the superweapon.

I'll update later today to show that superweapon when I'm finished updating it. It's called the Black Hole Generator. Guess what it does.

Oh I was just thinking it'd be interesting if there was a weapon that alters your trajectory so that you can alter your movement path if let's say there is a black hole in your path.

That blackhole gun is awesome. I like the fact that the bullets get shot back out since black holes do that (atoms anyway if my rudimentary knowledge of black holes is correct) but how come the bullets don't come back out towards the end?

[Belimoth]

Very cool, will you be able to change the velocity of your shots with the mouse wheel or anything like that?

[0x00000000]

Hou! I'm making something vaguely similar, alignment was indeed a bitch, especially when you try a relative cam camera. Great work!

At first I was using horizontal and vertical rotation for the mouse movement, and tried to then align that to the surface of the planet, but the hairy ball theorem was not letting that happen.

Now I'm using a quaternion which I rotate depending of the axes when the player moves the mouse, then from the forward and up vector I can align the mesh correctly.

Oh I was just thinking it'd be interesting if there was a weapon that alters your trajectory so that you can alter your movement path if let's say there is a black hole in your path.

That blackhole gun is awesome. I like the fact that the bullets get shot back out since black holes do that (atoms anyway if my rudimentary knowledge of black holes is correct) but how come the bullets don't come back out towards the end?

All weapons actually have recoil when you're floating in space, so you can change your trajectory by shooting in the opposite direction (yay newton's 3rd law), but usually the jetpack is a better choice. It's meant to balance space vs surface a bit too, make it harder to aim when floating.

The bullets that don't survive the black hole have hit the event horizon, from which nothing can escape (discounting hawking radiation), so it makes sense to destroy those. The ones that survive have their trajectory curved by the mass of the black hole but don't actually touch the event horizon. Usually the closer they get the more speed they gather.

Very cool, will you be able to change the velocity of your shots with the mouse wheel or anything like that?

I've thought about it, but the mouse wheel is used by default to switch between weapons and it would add another control to the game. I'm thinking of modifying the rocket launcher to work more like a grenade launcher where you can charge the speed of the projectile by holding the fire button.

[Belimoth]

That sounds like the best compromise.

[0x00000000]

I'm trying to get more familiar with Blender and its new fancy tools, like texture painting and the new dynamic scuplting (zbrush-like).
So I needed to make a sphere with less distorsion. A common one is the quad sphere, which is a cube that you unwrap, and then use a cast modifier to turn it into a sphere.


Then to try texture painting, I just used the default noise brush, and added color ingame, to get a pretty little star without texture distorsion, because blender projects the brush to the texture :

The color varies slightly ingame so that it doesn't look too much like a static texture. Also, I forgot to clamp the texture, so you can see seams.

Oh, and you can hook black holes. It's a terrible idea since a black hole will already suck you in, but I haven't prevented it yet. I will definitely prevent you from hooking to stars, for balance reasons, but black holes I don't know yet.

[Tondo]

This game looks pretty cool!

I can see myself getting a bit motion sick with the camera movement, but hey I haven't played it so that might not be a concern.

[0x00000000]

DOMINATING!

I mentioned Domination in the first post : it was probably my favorite gametype for Unreal Tournament when I wanted to play just for fun, but it was replaced later with double domination, which really wasn't the same.

And it's back!
First, capture points start like this :

When a point is touched by a member of a team, it starts changing colors until it gives the team 1 point (now it takes 5 seconds). When a capture point changes team the counter resets to 5 seconds, so you can deny the other team points if you manage to time your attack right, even if you don't keep the captured point long enough to get points.
Here's what they look like for red and blue, with their team emblems :

I want to change the "explosion" when you get a point to something like sparkles later.

[GeoffW]

This looks interesting.

I suggest you keep the graphical style well away from Super Mario Galaxy, so that people don't assume it's a clone.  You might not want to have so many bright green planets, for example.

[0x00000000]

The green planets are placeholders, the texture is just something I threw in 5 minutes with noise filters. Plus they have massive distorsion at the poles, I have to change them to quadspheres.

I'm not sure where I want to take the graphical style for the environment yet :/. Maybe I'll make a bunch of different planet types : ice, asteroid, mars-like, metal planet, some covered in part with lava... Or support new planet shapes, like cubes and tori. Not sure how to handle gravity on a torus though.

Edit : Oh shit.

[soryy708]

Capture The Flag could be nice.

My friend here says that it could be nice to have progress saving. For playing, you get points & get to buy with them equipment a la Battlefield style, but more balanced.
Personally, I feel neutral about his idea.

[0x00000000]

My friend here says that it could be nice to have progress saving. For playing, you get points & get to buy with them equipment a la Battlefield style, but more balanced.
Personally, I feel neutral about his idea.

That would introduce several problems (master database + accounts or hackable local files), and goes against the "oldschool arena shooter" gameplay I'm trying to bring to the game.
A player should be able to join a game and be on equal footing with everyone else. No item selection, class selection, weapon unlocks... You join a server, you start playing.

[gimymblert]

Torus are so much more convenient that sphere, to bad sphere is the intuitive volume for planete

[soryy708]

My friend here says that it could be nice to have progress saving. For playing, you get points & get to buy with them equipment a la Battlefield style, but more balanced.
Personally, I feel neutral about his idea.

That would introduce several problems (master database + accounts or hackable local files), and goes against the "oldschool arena shooter" gameplay I'm trying to bring to the game.
A player should be able to join a game and be on equal footing with everyone else. No item selection, class selection, weapon unlocks... You join a server, you start playing.

I totally agree 100% with you.
But that does give me an idea of customizable gameplay. Perhaps a couple of fixed classes with kinda different weaponry, or a perhaps the item can select a few items/weapons from a wide range of them. Or maybe select gadgets for weapons, or something similar.
While adding depth to the game, it doesn't add alot of complexity. Then again, up to you.