Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length

 
Advanced search

1411275 Posts in 69323 Topics- by 58380 Members - Latest Member: bob1029

March 28, 2024, 07:09:08 AM

Need hosting? Check out Digital Ocean
(more details in this thread)
TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsJack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG
Pages: 1 ... 8 9 [10] 11 12 ... 15
Print
Author Topic: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG  (Read 48963 times)
Fridgecrisis
Level 0
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #180 on: November 18, 2017, 11:01:16 AM »

Man, this is looking amazing! The battle animations are very impressive. Nice stuff!
Logged
empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #181 on: November 19, 2017, 04:35:59 AM »

Man, this is looking amazing! The battle animations are very impressive. Nice stuff!

Thanks!! :D
Logged

Fridgecrisis
Level 0
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #182 on: November 19, 2017, 10:34:34 AM »

Forgive me if this has been answered already, but I'm curious about your team. How many people do you have working on this, and how did you originally meet or approach them to work on Jack Move?
Logged
empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #183 on: November 20, 2017, 04:02:24 AM »

Forgive me if this has been answered already, but I'm curious about your team. How many people do you have working on this, and how did you originally meet or approach them to work on Jack Move?

Currently it's just me working on Jack Move fulltime, but I've been working with freelancers etc...

...Gary Lucken and Joe Williamson on and off. They have done all the character design and animation. I was introduced to Gary by some friends, and Joe I found after seeing some of his work show up on my twitter timeline.

Music is by Fracture, I've known Charlie for years, back from when I used to make music myself!

Sound design will be covered by (bafta award winning Tongue) Adam Hay, who I met through the local Brighton games scene.

I've also been working with Ed Fear on story stuff, who I used to work with at Mediatonic Smiley
Logged

Fridgecrisis
Level 0
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #184 on: November 20, 2017, 11:27:39 PM »

Cool! Sounds like you found people from all over, just from being involved in things. That's awesome.

So are they working on a commission basis where you keep creative control, or is this a group effort type of thing where they'll benefit from the end product?

I guess I'm curious because I'm wondering how I want to proceed with my project. Programming and music are not my strong points, so I feel like I'll need help with those, but I don't have money to hire anyone and I don't know if it's realistic to expect anyone to work for revenue share without having a pretty big hand in the creative decision-making. I'm open to sharing control but it would have to be with the right partners, you know? Is Jack Move a personal passion project for you, or something you feel comfortable changing for the sake of your collaborators?
Logged
empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #185 on: November 21, 2017, 07:53:15 AM »

Cool! Sounds like you found people from all over, just from being involved in things. That's awesome.

So are they working on a commission basis where you keep creative control, or is this a group effort type of thing where they'll benefit from the end product?

I guess I'm curious because I'm wondering how I want to proceed with my project. Programming and music are not my strong points, so I feel like I'll need help with those, but I don't have money to hire anyone and I don't know if it's realistic to expect anyone to work for revenue share without having a pretty big hand in the creative decision-making. I'm open to sharing control but it would have to be with the right partners, you know? Is Jack Move a personal passion project for you, or something you feel comfortable changing for the sake of your collaborators?

I pay folks for their time as and when needed, but hopefully I'll be getting people onboard for longer stretches soon, I'm not sure what deal we'll work out in that case.

This means that I currently retain full creative control, however I'm always open to suggestions. A lot of the way that battles are animated etc is down to Joe suggesting ways of taking effective shortcuts to cut down on animation etc whilst still retaining a good feel etc. For example, rather than the player/enemies running towards their target they just have a single "scoot" frame. As the scoot is quite a dynamic pose it still gives a nice sense of movement whilst keeping the amount of work down.

I'm not sure what I would suggest in your situation. Is this a business venture you will be collaborating on, is this just for fun? are you expecting to make money? Each comes with different levels of expectation for both you and any potential partners, and require different commitments.

My personal opinion is that if it is a commercial project, and unless everything is split down the middle 50/50 (ie, you are both/all investing an equal amount of money), you should be paying people.

If it's not a commercial thing, then it's probably gonna be hard to get people to actually do any work, even if they do get on board etc. It sometimes works, but often life can just get in the way. Sorry if that sounds cynical.

Hope that's useful Smiley

Logged

Fridgecrisis
Level 0
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #186 on: November 21, 2017, 08:17:59 AM »

No worries, that's not cynical at all! That's also been my experience in the past. I believe people should get paid for the work they do, and if they're not getting paid, then they deserve to make what they love instead of just following direction.

I guess in my case, I think I'll need to do as much work as possible on my own until I save up enough money to commission the things I need. Maybe a Kickstarter once it gets to a point where I have something to really show off. (Speaking of Kickstarter, do you have plans for a crowdfunding campaign?)

Thanks for sharing all of that. It's really encouraging to talk with someone on the same path I want to be on. Smiley
Logged
empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #187 on: November 21, 2017, 09:37:32 AM »

Cool, glad that was encouraging. I worked on Jack Move for a few years (first post in this thread is 2013  Cry) before I had enough savings etc to quit my day job and be able to contract people to help.

I've not got any plans for a crowdfunding campaign just yet, I'm looking at some other sources of funding to finish the game at the moment though Smiley
Logged

orzlab
Level 0
**


View Profile WWW
« Reply #188 on: November 22, 2017, 07:16:25 PM »

This game looks unbelievably awesome  Shocked
Logged
empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #189 on: November 23, 2017, 10:30:15 AM »

Thanks orzlab! :D
Logged

2ndStudio
Level 1
*


Game Developer


View Profile WWW
« Reply #190 on: November 24, 2017, 02:37:04 AM »

This game... It tickles all my nerd senses  WTF Keep it up.
Logged

empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #191 on: November 24, 2017, 07:26:08 AM »

This game... It tickles all my nerd senses  WTF Keep it up.

Hehe, thanks!!

Loads of bug fixes done this week, and some more work on those UI tweaks Smiley

The best bug I've squashed this week was one that's been annoying me for a while. When the camera follows objects in cutscenes, they tend to jitter a bit



After checking over all my code I determined that this happens in cutscenes and not during gameplay for a couple of reasons. Firstly because the movement speed of the object is usually slower which causes the camera to catch up with the object quicker. And secondly because of a rounding error, this is the main culprit. What is happening is that the player moves a pixel and it apparently takes the camera a frame to catch up. Here you can see it in slowmo...



At higher speeds this isn't really noticeable as the amount that player moves between frames causes the camera to always move too. But at lower speeds the rounding issue comes in to play. We round both the position of the player and the camera to whole numbers so that we render all nice and pixel perfect-y. But sometimes the camera position does not get rounded in the same direction as the object it's following, so it can be a pixel behind.

Here's our simple code:

Code:
Vector3 virtualCameraPosition = Vector3.SmoothDamp(CameraTransform.position, targetTransform.position, ref Velocity, Speed, MaxSpeed, Time.smoothDeltaTime);
CameraTransform.position = new Vector3(
    Mathf.Round(virtualCameraPosition.x),
    Mathf.Round(virtualCameraPosition.y),
    Mathf.Round(virtualCameraPosition.z)
);

We can improve this by caching our previous camera position and then working out if we should round up or round down, depending on which direction we're going

Code:
Vector3 virtualCameraPosition = Vector3.SmoothDamp(CameraTransform.position, targetTransform.position, ref Velocity, Speed, MaxSpeed, Time.smoothDeltaTime);
CameraTransform.position = new Vector3(
    virtualCameraPosition.x > cachedCameraPosition.x ? Mathf.Ceil(virtualCameraPosition.x) : Mathf.Floor(virtualCameraPosition.x),
    virtualCameraPosition.y > cachedCameraPosition.y ? Mathf.Ceil(virtualCameraPosition.y) : Mathf.Floor(virtualCameraPosition.y),
    virtualCameraPosition.z > cachedCameraPosition.z ? Mathf.Ceil(virtualCameraPosition.z) : Mathf.Floor(virtualCameraPosition.z)
);
cachedCameraPosition = virtualCameraPosition;



This is much smoother, but still not perfect. So if you have any tips to improve it further I'd love to hear them!

To finish up, here's a couple of screenshots of new UI bits, not super exciting i'm afraid:







I've unified the header with the player info, and the footer with the button help across all screens. As well as updating all the sliders to look a bit fancier Smiley

These next few days are going to be all about testing the build and fixing bugs as I've introduced a bunch of stuff in the last few weeks that I've not tested all the way through (portraits, new ui, battle backdrop stuff etc).

Cheers!
« Last Edit: November 24, 2017, 07:37:27 AM by empika » Logged

tchassin
Level 2
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #192 on: November 24, 2017, 02:21:57 PM »

I think the new UI bits looks great! Good job!
Also thanks for the camera script!
Logged

empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #193 on: November 25, 2017, 09:20:18 AM »

I think the new UI bits looks great! Good job!
Also thanks for the camera script!

Thanks Smiley The script isn't much, but hopefully it can help some folks that might be hitting the same problems with pixel perfect games as I have been.

Another method of snapping everything to the pixel grid that I might experiment with is detailed in this blog post https://ocias.com/blog/unity-pixel-art-camera/, Alex snaps all the geometry in a shader. A friend has been having some good results with this, so it sounds promising. I'm still not sure it can be 100% fixed though, just due to the nature of follow cams and loose lerping Smiley
Logged

bithead
Level 0
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #194 on: November 29, 2017, 03:22:09 PM »

I think for the camera issue you should store, and work with the "actual" camera position with full float precision, and use that when doing your SmoothDamp. Only round it only when you actually assign it to the display camera position.

EDIT: just looking at your code again, seems like you could just swap the first param of SmoothDamp to cachedCameraPosition instead of CameraTransform.position.
Logged

empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #195 on: November 29, 2017, 03:24:25 PM »

I think for the camera issue you should store, and work with the "actual" camera position with full float precision, and use that when doing your SmoothDamp. Only round it only when you actually assign it to the display camera position.

Yup, that's what the virtualCameraPosition is Smiley
Logged

HiddenNatureDsn
Level 0
***



View Profile WWW
« Reply #196 on: November 29, 2017, 10:57:29 PM »

Loving the aesthetic of the battle scenes especially.  Very cool stuff.
Logged
bithead
Level 0
**



View Profile WWW
« Reply #197 on: November 30, 2017, 12:39:29 AM »

Quote
Yup, that's what the virtualCameraPosition is

Yes, that was actually clear, sorry. I was hasty in my explanation because I was leaving work. Regardless, after studying your GIFs a bit, I realized what's actually causing the jitter. Seems obvious to say, but it's due to allowing a non-integer offset between the camera, and the player/target. The continuous smoothing virtually ensures it's always fractional.

If that's not clear, consider just the delta X between camera and target. It's probably fluctuating somewhat, but let's say it stabilizes at some non-integer distance. When the target's X position transitions over an integer/pixel boundary, it will likely happen during a different frame than the camera's X position, which will appear as though it's jumping ahead 1 pixel. Then the camera eventually transitions over the boundary, and the target will appear to jitter back into place.

Easiest fix is to just lock the camera to the target position, obviously. You can still transition the camera smoothly between targets (using an ease in/out curve over a fixed amount of time). Just don't smooth the camera while following the target. Another idea would be to have the camera smooth-follow the target like you have now, but at a significantly slower speed than the target so it drags behind, constrained to some maximum non-fractional radius. Once it stabilizes at the radius, so long as the fractional portion of the camera and target positions remain identical, and you shouldn't see jitter.

Anyway, hope that spurs some ideas. Love the progress you're making. Always gets me excited to see new Jack Move devlog updates Smiley
Logged

empika
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #198 on: November 30, 2017, 09:18:19 AM »

Thanks bithead.

Yeah, that's pretty much the issue. The problem now is that the camera smoothly follows fast moving objects, and lags behind nicely. But if the object is slow moving, then the issue rears it's head. This is particularly the case in cutscenes.

Your idea about constraining by some non-fractional radius is a good suggestion, but complicated in that the radius will need to be adjusted by the speed... which I can pull from the smoothdamp so may not be too big a deal.

I'll keep playing and see if I can figure something out. At least I have a better understanding of the problem now Smiley
Logged

katastrophic88
Level 0
**


View Profile
« Reply #199 on: November 30, 2017, 10:48:07 AM »

This looks amazing. I can't wait to play it! Thanks for sharing Jack Move's journey with us. Smiley
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 8 9 [10] 11 12 ... 15
Print
Jump to:  

Theme orange-lt created by panic