More Environment, Attacking Dynamics and Spider Crawling

All sorts of things have happened since my last blog. So here's one super blog.


The environment is properly up and running now, with lighting, particles systems and clearer textures. All the edges needed to be smoothed so the textures could be painted on and look correct, not skewed like they were before. Lighting really brought the mood we were talking about when designing the game. It really turned it from looking like a 3D programme to looking like an actual game.

The fighting mechanics are up and running, making some liberal use of state machines. All work was done with a demo skeleton found for free on the asset store (a pretty nice pack which can be found here). This was mainly done so we could prototype as much of the code as possible, with animations as well.
The code was also done up in a way where anything that could be summed up into a variable was, so hopefully once we start bring in .CSV files to store all our statistic information, that will help with the work load later on.

We haven't had a chance to demo the character attacking animations yet, but everything else with the character code is working, bar a few GUI additions. A navigation grid was brought in to help with pathfinding (the enemies also make use of this). Once that was added, the camera follow script needed to be changed to get it back to the way it was, which ended up actually improving the control of it.
Attacking works with a simple click and raycasting, which is the method used for all control of the character (such as picking up items and eventually, using levers, etc) to keep it all as coherent as possible.


At the moment, I'm working on our first enemy, the spider. After a day or so spent modelling and animating it (learning how to rig it was the hardest part, my 'ctrl Z' keys are in tatters), I've brought it into Unity and am encountering a few problems, mainly with the animations not being as clear as they are in 3DS Max. But the good news is that they are importing and working with the code.

The above is the Spider in the middle of its attack animation. As you can see, some of the legs actually move into the Spider's abdomen while doing so, which doesn't happen in 3DS Max. Something similar happens during its walk cycle as well.
Though as least these are all cosmetic problems, which I'm confident of finding a fix within a few days.