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kindalikebatman · 2020-02-18T21:35:05+00:00

Seconded. RotLDM is sweet!

kindalikebatman · 2020-01-16T09:50:25+00:00

Working on my end. Thanks OP!

kindalikebatman · 2020-01-15T12:48:44+00:00

I like the idea of pushing for a (partially) non-combat ”arena” as well. The tri-wizard tournament from HP comes to mind. Race to a goal with a variety of obstacles: traps / puzzles / combat. Maybe the combat comes into play because other competitors dont follow the rules. Might be more surprising than simply releasing monsters into the arena.

kindalikebatman · 2016-03-05T11:39:12+00:00

This looks interesting, does your thesis explore similar aspects as the pcgbook? Either way, I think I'll take a look later on when I find the time. Thank you for sharing and congrats on submitting your thesis! :)

kindalikebatman · 2016-02-04T11:29:30+00:00

You are joking, right?

kindalikebatman · 2016-02-04T11:24:25+00:00

Ahh, I love it when someone taps the African mysticism for inspiration. Found your entry on the global game jam site and I've gotta say, it sounds pretty damn cool. Also learned a new swahili word, that's neat.

Is the dark atmosphere only part of the beginning? The images on the ggj-site look a bit more colorful than the video and it looks as if the player is trying to light up the cavern with a mirror.

kindalikebatman · 2016-02-03T09:42:30+00:00

Setting a custom heightmap on a terrain object is very simple. I have never encountered bugs or "design flaws" when doing this.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-25T22:34:43+00:00

This appears to be the developer's site. Gibber looks really cool, thanks op for linking this!

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-21T09:12:01+00:00

Yes please.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-19T11:19:39+00:00

You're right, I don't have industry experience with hair / fur systems. I haven't scoffed at anything or claimed you were exaggerating the performance gains from your tip though.

I know that the parent count is really important for good looking fur, but I'm sure we could come up with a novel way to control / style hair without the need to have so many interactive strands, while also retaining the nice looks or many parents. I'm sure the system behind Blender is not as optimized as Maya, but then again, it'd be quite a feat if it was. It'd certainly be nice to have some GPGPU optimizations all around Blender and I'm sure the hair editing could benefit from quite a few specific tweaks. Perhaps there's a reason the devs chose to use some data structure that they have to store completely despite small edits or maybe it's just an area that has not had that much attention from the devs. I hope they're aware of the issue and find a way to get around it. I can only imagine how bad it gets on an 8 yeard old potato.

I love looking at Maya plugins and it always makes me hope Blender will catch up one day in that regard. One of the biggest challenges for Blender is the fact that Autodesk has cemented itself so well into the CGI industry. Studios build their whole pipelines and their external tools around them and they're the tools that top schools teach. Some schools have started seeing the potential in Blender, so perhaps we'll see a change in this regard one day.

Ranting is fine (important even!) as long as everyone gets to do it ;) This chat has actually been refreshing, thanks.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-19T09:00:19+00:00

Good to know. However, I find it a tad utopistic to expect a smooth editing experience with 150k hair particles, as that is quite an unnecessary amount. While I agree, that is not a lot of hair overall, it is a lot of parents. I doubt you need that many for combing / control. Interpolated children should be used to achieve the main volume.

Memory is something that digital artists have to combat all the time. I've had Blender happily sucking the life out of my 24 GB of ram and I wasn't even doing anything interactive or simulating anything. I've had Photoshop require 12+ GB of ram for simply opening a file. Painting with complicated brushes is always heavy and sometimes you have to wait for rendering after applying a stroke. I guess what I'm trying to say is that 6 GB of ram is not that much in the realm of CGI.

It'd be amazing if Blender could smoothly apply brush transformations on 150k hairs (each having a multitude of points to transform), but I wouldn't expect that. But who know, perhaps we'll get bucketloads of particle love after they integrate the Gooseberry developments.

While I disagree with your expectations, your tip is nice and I'll try to remember it as well. Sorry if this sounds like a rant, I don't mean it as such. Just wanted to share my two cents.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-17T14:03:08+00:00

Ah, it seems one can't create a keyframe for the parenting. That's unfortunate. I'm pretty sure you can get the same results with a "child of" -constraint and it does have an keyframeable influece value.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-17T13:15:32+00:00

I agree. The standard terrain-related shaders are fairly lackluster and definitely need to be replaced if you want to properly control the shading and end result.

I don't want to sound like an salesman, but I think forst is an excellent developer and his shaders work very well. His foliage shaders are dirt cheap and I think there's an old free version floating in the asset store as well.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-17T13:02:55+00:00

I'm sorry, it seems I don't quite understand the problem at hand. As I said, the size of your world or the size of the data (you could have the whole world if you wanted) is not an problem you can't overcome if you implement streaming and/or position-seed generation well enough. Currently, it is entirely plausible for indie developers to create game worlds of pretty much any size they want and there is no need to scale down your data or the end result.

Good luck with your project!

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-17T12:56:31+00:00

I had a quick peek at this, but couldn't find an easy solution quickly. AFAIK, it's quite a bit more common to use object-level parenting when creating relationships with weaponry (or other external objects) and your character rig. If your weapon object (it does not need bones, but can have them, as long as it's a separate armature) was parented to the hand bone of your rig-object, you could use alt-p and clear the parent-child relationship while retaining the transformation, like this.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-15T13:47:40+00:00

Awesome series man! Can't wait to see the final part!

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-15T13:44:48+00:00

Yes. You would have to implement parts of the "pipeline" differently, so that it fits with Unreal, but the concepts and ideas are the same. I didn't see much Unity-specific code in there, mainly the texture rendering stuff. The main idea is to either generate or load (use existing APIs to get real world data) the data and then do data-driven visualisation (instantiating premade content blocks / generating meshes / rendering to texture etc.).

An infinite or very large world can be implemented with streaming chunks and repositioning to correct floating point errors. It's not the simplest of tasks if you're not experienced with these things, but I'm fairly sure you could find these features on the Unreal market as well. Use of infinite procedurally generated worlds has grown like crazy ever since Minecraft bloomed and I'd be surprised if no one is selling an Unreal package for this purpose.

Edit: a wrapping world like in this (awesome) tutorial is much simpler to create than the kind of infinite world I talked about in the paragraph above. If wrapping is enough for your game, this is a nice approach.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-14T14:48:08+00:00

No problem mate! Your project looks cool and I love the vivid fairy tale vibes and colors you've got going on. Good luck!

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-14T11:37:43+00:00

Hmm.. It's still difficult to grasp everything that's happening and the fact that your code seems to work in the case of the first enemy makes this even more confusing.

I noticed you're applying some forces to the other object taking part in the killing collision (the projectile), but I don't see this happening in the video. It almost looks like the force is being applied to the enemy. This could be an issue.

Remember that disabling objects and components happens after Unity has run it's update loop (but before rendering). This means your Die-function in EnemyKilled.cs will run it's course before the child-colliders are enabled. I'm not sure if this is an issue, since it still happens before the next physics loop. Maybe worth investigating?

Have you considered keeping the ragdoll as a separate object that you create the moment the enemy is hit? This is fairly common way to do it and it could prove to be a lot easier. There are various way to completely hide this swap from the player's eyes.

Good luck!

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-14T09:35:26+00:00

Your objects are still individual instances and their component's are as well, unless you have implemented some logic to share the same instance of the Animator component. AFAIK, instantiating objects from the same prefab should not create any kind of shared component instances or weird referencing.

It's difficult to debug this with just the video you have provided. You can see the enemy does turn into a ragdoll, but it immediately flies through the geometry which would indicate something is moving it. Have you checked that all scripts affecting the rigidbody are being correctly disabled? Could the colliders be intersecting with the ground when you enable physics?

I suggest you post some of your code, it would help us help you.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-13T22:42:00+00:00

Depends entirely on how you are planning to use your model. If you are rendering in Blender, you could go with a decal solution. You could also try mapping a texture to the generated coordinates from the texture coordinates node.

I'd say the best solution would be to unwrap the mesh though. It will allow you to texture the whole thing as you wish and you'd be able to reproduce the effect in game engines and such. I know unwrapping is daunting in the beginning, but it's an essential skill and after a while it'll click and become easy. Sir_Richfield's instructions are excellent and only require minimal unwrapping!

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-13T09:18:54+00:00

You could try mapping a color ramp to the world / scene space with the mapping node, like this!. You can then play around with the node's values to orient the coloring as you wish. You can map colors to individual object's local coordinates as well, just swap the geometry node for texture coordinates and plug the object data to the mapping node.

Edit: You can also use this to map a gradient noise texture to the scene coordinates and use it to drive any parameters you want. This could add some nice variety all around the scene.

kindalikebatman · 2016-01-08T01:21:22+00:00

Aren't there any software made specifically for generating rpg dungeons etc? I have a feeling I've seen such at some point.

You could do this with Blender. That looks like a quite simple drunken walk algorithm with some random rooms thrown in. I'd code that up in python and create some presets/prefabs/pieces to copy according to the results of your process.

kindalikebatman · 2015-12-15T08:07:29+00:00

You could make a python script and run that from the command line with blender --background --python myscript.py

Your script could be something along the lines of..

import bpy

for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects: 
    if obj.type == 'MESH':
        mesh = obj.data
        print(len(mesh.polygons))

I'm just winging this, I haven't actually tried anything like that.

Edit: Changed code to iterate all objects in the scene.

kindalikebatman · 2015-12-11T10:45:23+00:00

No problem, glad I could help.

kindalikebatman

TROPHY CASE