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@snddev
Haven’t posted here in a while!
I have been exploring using UIToolkit for runtime menus and I love it. I find it so much easier to use and the results prettier than Unity UGUI.
I created this “MenuCreator” class to help me setup menus straight from code as opposed to having to set them up in UIBuilder visually or in UXML. Some people asked me about it and I decided to share it for free on github under MIT License.
https://github.com/DanielSnd/UIToolkitMenuCreator
Enjoy :)
My new game Garden Paws is now live on Kickstarter! :D www.gardenpawsgame.com/ks
Garden Paws is a relaxing role-playing game that doesn't limit your play style. Create your perfect simulation, whether you want to spend your days farming, exploring, fishing, questing or fighting.
Reorganizing the project
I want to do some work on SORI for now, reimplementing the actor controls using the new actor system I made for Immortal Quest with the spell system repurposed to do the skills of the players and enemies. It’s a pretty cool system and will make my life easier on the long-run for this project as well (and probably all other projects that come after that).
As I started trying to work on the SORI project I was having a lot of problems, the project has a LOT of third party assets and heavy content, making for long compilation and build times. Since I want to also implement Online Multiplayer into SORI that was going to get annoying really fast as I need to keep making builds to test things in multiplayer.
I figured out I could possibly work on the game mechanics in a separated project without all the bloated stuff, so I could enjoy faster compilation and faster build times, and sync it back to the real project when needed. Asked a question on /r/unity3D and it seems to be something that can work. Someone also pointed out submodules on git, but I’ll just do the “syncing” manually for now.
Created a new project and copied over the relevant code. Now I’m starting to rework it since there are some differences in architecture between IQ And SORI. In IQ I’m using my old GameManager/GameData system, which I don’t want to keep using in future games as I believe there are better ways to deal with that. And for movement while IQ uses my old Rocket Fist movement controls I’m using Kinematic Character Controller for SORI, which solves a lot of problems that I had with What the Box character controllers when working with a full on 3D environment.
Today wasn’t that exciting of a task, reorganizing code around never is. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have something more exciting to show as the character starts working with the new system :)
Falling off the horse, and object painter tool.
Since I made my post about motivation and started doing my daily-tasks I did quite a good run. 56 days working every day. And then I travelled to brazil to do an event and missed a day... After that one missed day the next one I was still pretty busy, so I missed it again... 17 days later there were plenty of days that I wasn’t really doing anything, but I didn’t work, I went back to my old inertia of not working.
Once you get going it’s really easy to keep going, one task a day is a very small achievable goal, specially if you can pick really small tasks, but breaking the streak can really do a number on your motivation :/
Well, let’s restart the count! A new day one.
While I was taking my break Kristina kept working on levels, making some really cool islands for SORI. We got some asset packs from the asset store so she could populate the islands and things are looking pretty good.
Adding and deleting prefabs out of the level was a bit of a chore, so seeing that I worked on a little tool that makes placing prefabs easier, by clicking on the terrain to place, with some sliders and toggles to place multiple objects at a time randomly in the radius. I also included toggles to randomize the Y rotation and the Y scale so the assets are painted with some variation. Plus can Ctrl+Click to delete objects placed with this tool so adding and deleting things gets way easier... Just missing a way to more easily select the desired prefabs, but it works pretty well for now :)
Campus Party
Today was a busy day, I ended up waiting till last day to put together my powerpoint presentation for the Campus Party talk. Spent the whole day working on it and giving interviews. Finished the day giving the talk.
It was a really interesting experience seeing so many people interested in what I have to say and doing inteviews with me. There was even a press conference set up in a quieter room of the event where they had me sit down in front of a circle of journalists asking me questions, hahahahah.
Had a blast giving the talk, lots of great questions and people seemed to really resonate with what I said. Glad people enjoyed it :) Afterwards there was a huge line of people coming to take selfies with me and ask me extra questions, huge ego boost, hahahaha.
If you want to check out the powerpoint (it has lots of cool little gifs from my past, present and future games :D very visual, although what is written is in portuguese). You can find the presentation here.
Tweaking the chick transformation
Started my work early, right when I woke up still in bed. Taking in some feedback from Kristina and Andrei suggesting more explosions and feathers, tweaked the particle effects on the chicken transformation. Kristina also thought the chick was too fast in its running around.
I made a new texture sheet for the feathers, making them brither and more varied. Increased the size of the poof a bit and made new particles so the chick is always throwing feathers around as it runs.
Lastly I changed the way the CheckCanMove works. Now not only can I forbid the character from moving, I can use that event to change it’s velocity speed! On the actor’s checkCanAct I added a new parameter MovementVelocity to the check, and I set it to the base-velocity, which is the original velocity attributed to the actor.
After the event is sent, I set the actor’s velocity to be that parameter, which might or might not have been changed by the event receivers (actor pieces, effects and currently executing spells).
On my chickened effect handling of events I added a check to see if it has the movementvelocity parameter, and if it does it changes it to 1 before returning a false for canmove (so the player can’t move the character itself).
This will be useful as well for speed boosts or slow-downs :D If we want to make a “cold slow spell” to slow the character down or a “agility up” buff that speeds the character up!
The rest of the day I went to the event location to get my credentials and check out the place, met some friends during the day, gave an interview to the TV station I used to work on and hanged out with Thiago for a while. It’s now 10pm and I’m really glad I did a task first thing in the day so I don’t have to work while feeling super tired... Doing a task first thing in the day is great :D I should do that more often!
Is your game going to be an mmo?? :0
No, most definitely not D: nope.
It might be online multiplayer though, with a limit of 4 players playing together at a time.
Becoming a chick!
It’s really hard to work while travelling in my hometown, so many friends and family to see and so much stuff to do! Not to mention the big event coming up D:
Today ended up starting to work at 9pm, so needed another really quick task. Instead of working on the enemy AI that is a bigger task and takes more thinking which I’m way too tired to do at the moment. I decided to finish implementing the “chick effect”.
When a player is “chickened”, it cannot move by itself, nor take any actions, and (as with other CCs like Frozen) it will lose its chickened effect when hit.
Whenever the effect starts, I hide the player object. The chick object is an effect overlay so it gets spawned automatically with the effect like the frozen ice does. Whenever the effect ends I recycle the chick object and unhide the player object. I also register for the CheckMove and CheckAct events so we can return false when receiving the checks. And for the AfterTakeDamage so we can cencel the effect if we get an AfterTakeDamage event.
For regular players (not testing dummies that cannot move), the chick should be running around, so I decided to apply some sine waves to the movement of the player while it’s chickened, which ended up looking pretty cool as the chick runs in circles with the sine waves. For that I tried using the “Tick” method I created that gets ticked every 0.1f but that wasn’t smooth enough, so I ended up creating a new “Update” method for the effects, which gets called from the actor every frame, and set up my movement there.
This was my end code for the Chickened Effect. I also made a quick “poof” effect with some flying feathers to aid with the transformation feeling. That’s it for now :) Just a quick task for the day.
Riggin and Animating the Chick
Today I was going to keep on working on the AI, but as I started to work it was already fairly late and I was feeling way too tired. Can’t really wrap my head around decision-flex’s way of doing things when I’m feeling this tired so I decided to do another smaller task that I can do without thinking too much.
I ended up never rigging and animating the chick for the “Turned into a chicken” effect, so I decided to do that today. The rig is fairly straight-forward, just a couple of bones in the middle for COG+Top, then bones on each extremity for Dynamic Bone to move.
Once I rigged and skinned it I threw it into unity and applied Dynamic Bone to the whole thing to see how it would look, feels kinda funny to see all the wibbly wobbly bits flopping around with dynamic bone without any animation yet.
I then pulled the rig in akeytsu and did a couple quick animations, an idle, a “eating corn” and a “crazy running”. I’ll probably only end up using the crazy running one in the effect.
That’s it for today :)
Spitballing an enemy attack.
For the first time since I started my “one-task a day” I failed :( I travelled to Brazil to do a talk on Campus Party Bahia back in my home-town, it was over 30 hours of travelling between sofia, istambul, são paulo and finally my final destination in Salvador Bahia and I ended up not being able to do a single task.
The day I started the trip I did do some small fixes on Immortal Quest’s level editor so Kristina my Game Designer/Level Designer could work on some levels while I was gone, and imported an asset pack we got for the Shipwrecked game so she could work on it. But I ended up not posting anything about that since it wasn’t really visual. The second day of travelling I was way too tired and couldn’t really work comfortably in the planes/airport so I really did nothing. Kristina however was hard at work making new levels for SORI with the asset pack we got and things are looking pretty cool :D the picture above is from one of these levels.
Spent the day hanging out with my family and was about to miss another task of the day but forced myself to do something before sleeping (it’s 7pm local time but 1am back in sofia where I came from so suuuuper tired, still recovering from the trip).
I do love making all my own art for the games, but if I want for things to progress faster I should start to make some concessions... I decided to get some art packs for enemies, and change them into my art style, using their mesh as a base-mesh to work upon and using the rig/animations that they come with. That way I get enemies that still look some-what unique when compared to their originial versions but I do skip a lot of work on rigging and animating.
This lil’ plant guy will be my first enemy, although he doesn’t walk and I’ve spent the past few days working in a system for movement ;P Today I decided to implement an enemy attack using the spell system. All the enemies attack will be spells in the game, the player won’t have access to using those spells though (or maybe they will? who knows D:)
I like making my enemies to be just like players. The enemy share all the components a player has, except for the PlayerInput component. Instead of having a PlayerInput, the enemy has an Enemy AI Input which will pass on to Actor Ctrl the calls that PlayerInput usually passes. I implemented a simple state machine, which I mostly copied from the one I created for SORI in the latest ludumn dare. I’ll drive this state machine later on with DecisionFlex later on but that’s a task for another day.
The beauty of having the attacks actually be just spells, is that the whole attack logic actually resides inside the spell pieces. Before in the SORI/Ludum Dare version of the enemy AI, I had the whole attack logic with the telegraphing particles and animations inside the state logic, spanning from the start state, update state and actual shooting. Now the logic is way simpler in the state machine, it only has to call the “PrepareSpell” method on the start, and the spell will take care of all the telegraphing in the PrepareSpell piece, just like it would if a player was “holding the button down” of the spell, then when it’s time to attack I make the AI “release the button”, releasing the spell. In this case the AI is very similar to an actual player using a controller.
I made a new poison projectile prefab, with poison-esque particle effects, and set up a new “Angry Plant Spit” spell, inheriting from BaseAttack. I lowered the speed and added a PrepareSpell piece, so our enemy “telegraphs” its attack, giving the player a chance to dodge.
This is a pretty cool way of building enemy attacks, and will make my enemy code super reusable :)
Next up I should start connecting the state machine to DecisionFlex for the AI decision-making. Which will be a task for another day.
That’s it for now, now I rest xD
More multi-threaded rapidly exploring random trees stuff
Today I continued working on my multi-threaded RERT. First I made a new class called RertRequest, and that class contains everything a RERT needs to run. That way I can run several requests at the same time from different enemies.
Once I got that working, I decided to try and abuse the system to see how it would handle it. I set it up to run 100s of paths in one frame and the system froze for a few seconds. I profiled it and saw that just like regular co-routines, the Thread ninja system was also generating a lot of garbage with its yields. I experimented with a couple of different free threading solutions and ended up landing on “Task Paralllel” which gave me the best results so far. I also made a little queueing system to avoid running all of the RERTRequests in the same frame, I can limit how many can run per frame and the others go into a queue to be considered for next frame.
As long as I keep the number of requests per frame reasonable, I can ran my 100s of requests without impacting my fps (I added the little bouncing black ball to show that the main thread keeps running happily while all that crazy pathing is going on.)
It is still generating garbage though, quite a bit of it. I think there is no way around generating garbage when creating a new thread. If I do end up needing to optimize further I might need to just keep a thread for the navigation and just stop it when not using and run everything I need to run through there instead of initiating new threads...
I made a little follower to test the paths, and it seems to be working fairly well. The follower simply keeps moving in the direction of the next point in the path, if it’s within a certain range of it it removes it from the path and starts going towards the next point of the path. For the game I’d probably add some more randomness to it’s directions to make it a little bit less of a bee-line. I also will keep re-creating the path every 0.25th of a second or so to make sure it still looks like the enemy is making decisions and actually going towards where the player is, not where the player was.
In reality, doing it that way, I’ll probably never have more than 2 or 3 path requests going on at the same frame, since each enemy will be only requesting 1 path every 0.25th of a second or so.
If you want to check out how it’s looking like now, the unitypackage can be found over here.
Tomorrow i’m both travelling back to sofia (in the morning/lunch-time) and to Brazil (at night). Going to spend 2 weeks back in my home-town to give a talk at the local Campus Party edition. Might be hard to work the next 2 days, but will try to do something, even if a small task, let’s see how that goes.
Weird bug with the Training Dummy and... new navigation system?
So today I was going to continue testing some spells, but I ran into a weird bug... Don’t know if any of you guys have had that happen to you before but...
The training dummies seem to have gone on strike, and are talking about unionizing... I googled but couldn’t find anything about it on stackoverflow, someone said it might be related to using Visual Studio COMMUNITY. Tried reinstalling unity but didn’t solve it, so I decided it’s time to stop using training dummies and start working on the enemies.
I really liked using Rapidly Exploring Random Trees on Rocket Fist, they give pretty random paths that feel more natural to me than A* or other navigation solutions, so I wanted to continue using them for this game. However I believe my implementation of it wouldn’t work as well in a larger map since I run it quite a lot updating my paths and in this game can have quite a bit of enemies on the screen at the same time.
So I decided to try and make it better and multi-threaded. First I started by searching to see if someone already had done it before me. The closest I found was this “Transition-based RRT” implementation by Steven P. Clark apparently created for a class project a while ago (and thankfully using the MIT License!). The implementation seemed to work quite well with the provided example so I set out to make it multi-threaded and to work without a terrain.
I decided to use Thread Ninja - Multithread Coroutine to help me with the multithreading since I had no previous experiencing with doing anything multi-threaded.
My first problem was with the use of Random.Range(), apparently that’s not thread safe... the longer I went into this, the more things I discovered are not thread safe...
Ended up doing a lazy Random.Range implementation using System.Random, I compared the results with unity’s random and it feels random enough to me so I rolled with it.
My next big problem is that I used Raycasts and linecasts to decide whether or not a new point in my tree could see the goal or a previous point in the tree. Also to see if my new random point was a floor or a wall. Raycasts are MOST DEFINITELY not thread safe.
I decided my next step would be creating a grid, similar to how A* and other pathfinding algorithms start with, but instead of actually calculating the navigation through the grid I’d just use that grid as a replacement for my raycasts and to validate my random positions. The grid can be created with different tile-sizes and different tolerances (which I show in the gif) to fine-tune the desired results.
For my raycast-replacements I repurposed a “painting a line in a texture” code to test lines on my grid from one cell to another. That way if any of the cells in my line returned as non-walkable, I stopped “drawing the line” and returned false. In the future I can change the algorithm a little bit more if I decide to use the same system on the viking game that has ramps and such, to know if I can access the next sell via jumping or falling down. For now just knowing if it’s walkable or not will do.
I had to cache a few things like my start-point and end-point before I started my thread but other than that, the rest was smooth-sailing. I now have a RERT implementation that works multi-threaded and gives me blazing fast path-results.
If you want to see the mess I made you can find a unitypackage here.
Next step will be starting to implement that as a navigation system for my AI.
Using the mouse
IThe most annoying thing of testing the game in the pc is the lack of the joystick. Without the analog joystick using only the keyboard is pretty impossible to be precise with your aiming. In a lot of those spell gifs I was having a hard time hitting my target. Today I finally implemented aiming though the mouse if the player is using mouse+keyboard for controls.
If the player changes to keyboard+mouse I spawn an arrow with a pivot point at the end of it. I position it wherever the mouse is pointing and rotate it so the body of the arrow points towards the player. I also scale the arrow down in the Z axis based on the distance to the player (with a clamp so it stops scaling at a certain point). That way the arrow gets small when close to the player.
Whenever the player casts a spell I turn the player to look towards the mouse direction, and make sure he keeps looking there until enough time has passed without casting a spell, then he goes back to looking to where he is moving.
The aiming also works with the area spells, the spawn circle follows the aim position.
So the keyboard+mouse controls are working fairly well, I do need to create new animations for strafing and walking backwards now, since the player can be moving sideways. But that might be a task for another day... I should really get started on the enemies, that should be my priority now that the spell and controls are out of the way.
Keyboard or Gamepad?
Today did a quick trip to plovdiv where I’ll be for the next few days. Spent most of the day enjoying the city which means today’s task is a fairly small one.
With the playtest coming closer and actually trying to play with a keyboard using the gamepad’s input code I decided to actually start implementing keyboard+mouse controls for the game.
In today’s task I made the player input aware of what kind of controller you’re using, if it detects your last input came from a keyboard, it switches the player hud UI to the “keyboard mode”. In this mode a spell is always selected, and that’s the spell your mouse click will use. To change spells you have to press between 1 and 4, or use the mouse scroll wheel. Haven’t finished implementing all that but that’s the basic idea.
For now just implemented the spell selecting using the 1-4 keyboard keys and the player HUD changing based on it.
Another little change, added the health in text on top of the potion, not sure if that will stay there, but it helps debugging things at least for now.
A whole lot of spells!
Tomorrow I’m travelling for a couple of days, so today I wanted to accomplish a bit so tomorrow can be a smaller task... Went from 5 implemented spells to 16 implemented spells out of a total of 34 planned!! 18 left to go :D
Using the spell pieces I already had in hand it was easy to put them together. I downloaded a whole bunch of particle FX packs and went to work mixing and matching them.
First Firebolt, a bolt of fire, almost a little laser of fire. It deals piercing damage. For that I added a “Piercing” variable on SpawnProjectile, so I can set on the spreadsheet whether the damage will stop on the first character or not. I also tweaked my AlertManager’s World Alert to be able to do the damage numbers with a cool arcing animation :)
Fireball is just a regular projectile, at least for now, not sure if it will gain new abilities later... who knows.
Fire Storm is pretty badass. A bunch of fire balls falling from the sky into the desired location. For this one I added a variable called “Rain” to the spawn projectile. If it’s true it will pick a random position above the desired spawn location, spawn the projectile there and direct it to the original spawn position. Boom, raining projectiles!
First of the water spells, water bolt is a little ball of water. Straight up regular projectile.
Ice shard is a shard of ice, regular projectile as well, maybe it should be piercing like fire bolt?
Make it Rail is the badass ice counter-part to Fire Storm :D being impaled by those ice shards must hurt.
Ice Cubed I showed yesterday, but here it goes again for completion’s sake. Today I implemented “allies / enemies” system, so it now only affects enemies :) For that I added a couple variables to the apply effect piece. “ApllyToEnemies” and “ApplyToAllies”.
Electric Bolt is a regular projectile, a ball of electricity.
Chain Lihgtning is another regular projectile (for now). Later on it might branch off to hit other enemies in range of the initial one.
And lastly the 2 Lightning attacks that I made a couple of days ago.
Rock Bolt is a regular projectile, a little rock ball with a trail of dirt.
Big Rock is a bigger/more damage version of it :)
I changed the ApplyEffectTo so it also works without any other pieces. If no other pieces are present it will just apply on its own position, and if the “Range” variable is 0 it will apply the effect to your own player only. I also added a Percent variable to control how much percentage the effect will affect, if it’s an effect that uses percentages like those two. It also now considers whether or not to apply to enemies or allies. As you can see below, Encourage was only applied to my ally training dummy besides my own player.
Healing is also implemented now. It’s literally applying negative damage with a “TakeDamageEvent”. When damage is negative I understand it’s healing and don’t do any of the hurt-specific things, instead I call OnHeal event and change the color of my damage numbers to green.
That’s it for now :D Today was very productive! Tomorrow should be a quick task, but soon I’ll be working on the enemy AI to get to a playtestable stage ^^
What is cooler than being cool?
Today was a CHILL day, building on the “choose position” piece I made yesterday, I decided to do a really COOL spell... Ice Cubed.
For this spell I built a new spell piece called “ApplyEffectTo”, it can be used in conjunction with a Projectile Spell or a ChoosePosition. Whenever the spell is activated if there is a position it will apply the desired effect to any actor in that position. In case of a projectile, after an attack happens it applies an effect to the actor attacked. This is how it looks like.
For the frozen effect I spent quite a bit of time working on a toony Ice Shader based off of @minionsart ‘s Ice Shader. I reconstructed it in Amplify Shader Editor and added refraction to it, then tweaked it until I was happy with the results. it’s quite messy but it works :D
via GIPHY
For my Frozen Effect itself, I hooked on to the CheckCanAct and CheckCanMove events, and return false to them, that way the player can’t move or do anything. I also check if the player has an animator and set the speed of the animator to 0 so all animation is stopped while the player is frozen.
Lastly I also hook on to AfterTakeDamage so I instantly stop the frozen effect once the actor gets attacked. If you want to see how it looks in the code check it out here.
I also did some cleaning up on the code, I was starting to get confused trying to remember exactly how I wrote parameters and event names, so I made a class that holds all my names, so I can use autocomplete when writing code for them in Visual Studio. It’s going to be useful later to know what kind of events I can hook up to and what kind of parameters I can expect.
That’s it for now.
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening
I started my day experimenting with my old Rapidly Exploring Random Tree code... I want to make it better and multithreaded so I can use it bigger levels for Immortal Quest and with more enemies without it really being a problem. I figured I’ll have to transition into using it with a grid if I want to go multi-threaded since I can’t really go doing raycasts in other threads, but that would end up taking too much time and I would end up without any really visual cool stuff to show for today’s task so mid-way through the day I shifted gears.
There was a lot of thunders and lightning in sofia the other day, and one of my spells is a Lightning bolt, so I figured that would be a good task to do using my new “Preparing Spell” piece from yesterday. I extended from it and created a “ChoosePosition” spell piece.
You can see the ChoosePosition Spell piece here. Basically it extends from the PrepareSpell piece, spawns a particle fx when it starts executing (called by PrepareSpell) and uses the actor’s input values to move the particle fx around. When it gets the event “OnBeforeActivateSpell” it injects the parameter “position” with the particle fx position. I love how simple it is to add functionality with this system! :D
via GIPHY
I did have to do a big refacoring on my Spawn Projectile code. I wanted to be able to spawn other sorts of objects, and the functionality for that shares a lot of similarities with SpawnProjectile. So I copied over the SpawnProjectile code to a new SpawnObject code, and made it a parent of SpawnProjectile. I also made a new SpawnableObject parent for the ProjectileObject, which has some shared functionality. Now I can spawn and handle all sorts of things with very similar variables being defined.
via GIPHY
The angle variable that defines the angle of the shot in the projectiles can be used to spawn a circle of things. I also added a new distance variable that can be defined to have more randomization in the circle, it takes ranges ”Distance=“1-5” will randomly assign a distance between 1 and 5 for each instance spawned.
These are the entries in my database for the new spells. I love being able to use inheritance in those ;)