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[Nition]

Here's a new video. Still no sound or real gameplay, but it shows building a vehicle and driving it around, with all the basics working.





I also finished making scrapsgame.com(!!), which has taken me all week. It's just a Wordpres back-end. All the latest information will be available there, but I'll keep up the posting here as well. Mostly the updates will probably be the same at both places.

Have a couple of new screenshots too:

[Xion]

shit son this looks so damn fly. I love the clean-ass style.

[DustyDrake]

Too many guns and not enough power?

[Nition]

Greatest problem with that vehicle is that the rear guns couldn't fire without hitting the front guns.

Of course, I guess you could use the front guns until they're dead, and then you've got your "backup guns." Actually, I need to implement a weapon control system that lets you set specific keys to specific groups of weapons.

[Panurge]

This is starting to look magnificent. Can't wait for something playable.

[Windybeard]

The video looks amazing and im very much looking forward to see where this goes. Good luck!

[geepit]

Woah this looks cool! Keep up the good work

[andy wolff]

This looks really neat. I can't wait to see where you go with it

[Nition]

Had it so you could switch between keyboard/mouse or controller as your in-game controls. Wanted to change it so both were actually actually active at once, so you could easily switch between or use both, but was worried about the overhead of checking both inputs all the time. Actually profiled the time taken to check each one. Time is about 0.0000007 seconds. Decided that having them both enabled will not be a problem.

[Nition]

You know you're making serious games when you start finding bugs in the engine. Found a bug in Unity 4 this morning - when you move an object between Scenes with a light on it, and the light has a halo effect, the effect stops working and you get one or an infinite stream of "Unable to find Halo" errors.

Looks like only one other person has ever mentioned it online and that was a few days ago, so it's probably a recent issue. Anyway, it was easy enough to make a simple project to reproduce the issue and send in a bug report.

Unity seems to have a few minor issues with bringing things between Scenes. I also discovered that rigidbodies reset their centre of mass, which is a bit bizarre. Another weird one that I submitted, though it's not Scene-change based: When changing LODBias to certain values in code, the Anisotropic setting is also changed from ForceEnable to Enable. It may be intentional but if so, is undocumented.

Still, I think Unity was by far the best choice for this project. I was thinking of using XNA and just a few months later, XNA is basically dead.

[ｍａｓｏｎ]

There were a lot of games like this in the mid 2000s, I'm not sure what happened. I'm glad to see another one.

[Reggie02]

@xion. I saw your sig while looking at random forums and I have to say that animation is amazing  . I looked at Catacomb Kids on your site and that is even more amazing  ; so If it isn't any trouble, I would like for you to answer these questions:
-What was CK made/programmed with?
-what manner of wizardry/witchcraft/software did you use for the animations?
-can you perhaps show me the steps you used to achieve this?

I believe good animation is a HUGE part in making games in general, so keep it up man!.

cheers

[Nition]

Object pools! With C# code. http://www.scrapsgame.com/object-pools-in-unity

[Sustrato]

With the right designer, this game could be amazing. Looking forward to it.

[Nition]

Reggie02, you can send a personal message to Xion by clicking the little speech bubble under his name. He's probably more likely to see your questions that way than in a random unrelated thread.

[Greg Game Man]

VERY cool.

How does it work? Is this wheel colliders and add torque/steerAngle? I thought you'd parent the object to the car and add its mass to the main rigid-body, but i see the mass is affected properly - is there some join attachment thingy in Unity?

Hope this gets an art overhaul for a stronger theme later on - like Twisted Metal.

[Nition]

There are joints in Unity but I'm doing what you first suggested: There's a single master rigidbody on the chassis which the mass of all parts is added to. There's also a master parent of all parts so that together they form a big compound collider.

The wheels are a little bit separate. They have their own mass and use WheelColliders, albeit with an extra collider added to help them with side/top collisions (WheelColliders only collide along a single line).

The wheels physically steer but the movement force is actually added to the main chassis now (shh, don't tell everyone!). Reason being that I have no real idea how much engine power a player might add to their car, and big engines = car flips over, even when using four wheel drive. I had a system where it would switch between front and rear wheel drive depending on which way you were going, but adding the force to the chassis instead of the wheels just makes it way simpler and generally better, although it's introduced some other issues.

The actual vehicle driving code is a custom script I wrote. It uses less "magic" than the Unity car tutorial's car script, but a little bit more magic than some other car physics examples.

[Nition]

A couple of new things that you can see here (click for full-size). Capacitors (the blue components with the lights) allow you to store more total power. So for instance you might make a vehicle which doesn't generate a whole lot of power (because generators are relatively expensive) but has a couple of capacitors so it can store a lot of power. That way you can hopefully last the length of a fight before your power runs out, and recoup in the next lull.

I'm also aware that it doesn't make a lot of sense for all weapons to need energy when they look mostly like gunpowder weapons which should be self-powered. I'll think about it more later, but there will definitely be pure energy weapons as well (e.g. lasers), and there'll also be cooling required eventually which can apply to all weapon types as well. Gunpowder-y weapons may switch to needing cooling only.

Second new thing is the red boxes like you can see above the chassis. Hopefully it's sort of obvious in-game what those mean. These are "reserved" areas where you can't place parts even though there's nothing there - in this case because the driver's entrance hatch is there. It didn't really make sense before where the chassis would have no snap points on top, but you could still build directly above it if you did so off of other parts.

Internally I've also made some  big changes over the last couple of days. All parts are now loaded on startup and allowed to run their setup scripts, as well as creating their Build Screen inventory previews. When new parts are created, they're now cloned off of those original parts which have already run their setup. More importantly, the Build Screen no longer reloads every part every time it's opened! The one set of everything is persistent right throughout the game.

[:^)]

oh gosh this is so cool

[Eigen]

I wanna try this sooo bad