next »

[compostface]

Charging from the ground, yah.  The shader stuff will only be used for effect, when/if it actually fits, not as a constant thing

-- -- --

Made an animation for a trap yesterday:

[Nico May]

So many hard-coded values I want to cry.

[oahda]

That's fine as long as it's isolated to its own class/script/w/e file! Games do require specific things. :p

But you could clean it up by assigning them to variables or constants with descriptive names. Easier to tinker with details too.

[Nico May]

Yesterdays gif was stale, I'm sorry. Hows this? Added some mockup shader and screenshake effects.

Click to play.



We'll likely also make the sides higher so it requires a split-second wall jump to escape.

[Mya]

Excellent stuff - really loving the desolate feel of it, and the clunkiness of the machines, I can hear them moving already .

[Nico May]

So, this took me several days, and lots of reading/beating my head while trying to comprehend, but thanks mainly to Nature of Code, I managed to get a sorta-rope-sim-thing working, which I today got in game, so here's the first way we're playing with it, note that this is not a real design, just a demo of one use of the ropes.

[Petey]

Very cool atmosphere and visual design going on here, I like it!

Your rope sim is looking pretty neat. Here's what I always reference for rope-sims. A bit old now, but relatively simple and easy: http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030121/jacobson_pfv.htm

[Paul]

So, this took me several days, and lots of reading/beating my head while trying to comprehend

I know the feel! Good job though, they have some nice movements going

[Sabaku]

Remind me of some kind of underwater-plants. Would fit the setting pretty well

[Nico May]

Thanks everyone!

@petey, thanks for the link, I'll definitely be checking it out, if its anything like most physics stuff its probably above my current level, but I have several hundred bookmarks I can mix it in to for when I'm able to better understand that stuff;)

Today I got to see a bit of what it must be like for Joar from RW when he skins creatures, and I gotta say, it was crazy fun, watching a simple thing come to life, giving it form and color while retaining the dynamic movement. We didn't have a design made up for this, so this is just me messing around, but for a first try I kinda like it.

[Nico May]

After playing around with skinning that plant yesterday, and having recently been playing with shaders, an idea came to me, and for once it actually seemed like it might be useful.

If the skin of these plants is simply a strip along a line, then instead of hard-coding designs for plants, I could pass a function on creation, that is called for each link along the chain that makes up the plant, passing the percentage along the chain, and returning info used for changing attributes of the skin at that point. Currently, this means I can control width and color, in a way that feels much like using a shader. If/when I make the chain simulation more detailed, I will also allow the shaders to control physical properties of the individual links.

Now, the first, and main thing this allows us to do is create many, and varied plants (currently only single stalk based ones, but we'll see); it lets us do this quickly and experimentally, playing around in the same way we get to do with shaders.

Now the second part, which was initially an unintentional by-product of poor optimizing of the skinning system, is the fact that this function is called for every point, every frame. I was about to fix this when I realized what it meant we could do: real time animation of already dynamic plant life, and personally, that sounds pretty cool to me. Hopefully we can use these tools to flesh out our little world to be more dynamic and interesting, we'll just have to watch and see.

The following is a quick test, not a real plant design, just me messing around with the shader-things, final designs will look nicer.

[FryDay]

Does luxe have an easy way to create a camera that follows the player like that? I've just started to look into luxe...seems much more powerful then HaxeFlixel...

[Nico May]

Does luxe have an easy way to create a camera that follows the player like that? I've just started to look into luxe...seems much more powerful then HaxeFlixel...

Saw you on the gitter, but I'll respond here anyway in case anyone else wonders. No, it doesn't have builtin camera following stuff, but luxe is built to be expanded upon, so its very easy to just make a component that controls the camera, simple following is very very quick, what I use is a little more complex but I would be happy to explain if anyone is interested.

Nico

[TheWing]

Good god those rope-thingy-plants look amazing <3<3

Can't wait to get my hands on something playable

[Nico May]

So I've still been playing with plants, and the skinning system. Orbitantlers wanted to try some more land-plant-ey feeling stuff, but I didn't want to split the code, so I added the ability for skins to affect gravity and air friction (theoretically individually for each link, haven't tested to see what we could do with this yet).

Before looking at the following gifs, note that the following code is all it takes to generate them, very artist friendly hopefully, just a single set of params you can mess with:



So here's a kinda grass-feeling plant (sorry static camera, otherwise gif was grainy).



And to prove the flexibility of this code, this is the exact same skin, just applied to plants with more/closer links:



Edit: This is what happens when you use that same skin, only one, and just randomize the number of links and the link lengths.

[sam_suite]

Shit, dude, that's phenomenal. Is there a way to put the plants behind the terrain? might be neat to have some of them go behind the floating platforms and stuff.

[Yale]

Shit, dude, that's phenomenal. Is there a way to put the plants behind the terrain? might be neat to have some of them go behind the floating platforms and stuff.

Or even make it so they don't grow below platforms / grow around them?

[nightvisioncarpetbomb]

Something very pleasing about watching the character scrubbing through the grassy plants!

[Nico May]

Thanks guys, I played with depth stuff a bit and it looked cool, but I need a better way of managing it, as the level chunks can be at different depths too (so they can be overlayed).

I've started work on what will hopefully be an anemone-like creature, built out of these plant physics things, its neat to see how the animated physics work, you have to go more by trial and error and sometimes go with something unintentional, but it almost always looks cool in some way, even if you go too far and the sim breaks down (arguably the coolest looking part). It's cool too because everything is just forces, so even as the tentacles curl in, they are still affected by your momentum through them.

Btw, sorry about the crap gif, think the gradients are causing it too have too many colors, also Compostface hates this green, but that's ok because its just a random test color, I have no attachment to it.

[Ohmnivore]

Loving the grass physics!