#bonehound

[rei-makes-big-robo]

Day #1: Neck works???

Technically not the first day but the first day writing actual code even though half of what's going on here is just the default movement code with some tweaks. Anyways I did a bunch of stuff just getting the neck animated as I want to ensure that Bonehound is more than just a playermodel following a default player rig. To this end I'm going to be animating as much as I can procedurally and it is at this point I've started to regret using a normal armature/Skeleton3D. Godot seems to be kinda limited in how much control you have over bones in script and constraints, which does make sense considering that I am on 4.3 which only really has a solution that is going to be replaced with something better.

[vargamormusings]

Processing bones in either water or earth can result in corpse wax. I do my best not to be wasteful when I am fortunate enough to find bones, and as a result, I am trying to utilize the adipocere. I was prepared for it to smell rotten , or at least gamey, but as it turns out, the smell of the beeswax far outweighs any smell that the corpse wax has!

[rei-makes-big-robo]

Soup time!!!

I moved things over to Godot 4.4 and nothing broke! Switched the project over to Jolt physics and promptly began making Grembot gibs. After I got all the gibs done and tested everything out I was like hmmmmm how many gibs can this handle all colliding at once... So it was Soup Time and the answer is it gets rough around 700 but really gets bad at 800. Despite everything at 864 it just results in a physics tick taking 1000ms to complete which uhhh put into perspective how low impact everything else I'd been doing was. Now if only I could figure out how to instantiate the gib scenes with alternate colours I'd be mostly ready to start building enemies to tear apart. In the end I'm likely going to just have to make a gib for every colour variant I make... I feel myself losing steam on this project but fun little memes like this that push development forward have kinda become what keeps it going. I'm aiming to push out a demo level set to gauge interest with and depending on the results of that will decide how far this goes. I want to give it a fair chance but I feel like I have other things I want to try making at the moment. I've learned a few things in making this that have given me visions of how I can apply stuff from this to the Godot Hammerden port and that really excites me. With Hammerden being a VR project though it's tough to allocate time to a passion project like that especially considering its higher fidelity aesthetic. Anyways hopefully my rambling has been somewhat interesting or at least entertaining, I think that's everything for this "devlog" :3

[rei-makes-big-robo]

Day #2: Legs work??????????????????

There is something incredibly frustrating about knowing you have to use a flawed component... Bonehound having abnormal leg design resulted in IK results looking horrible and just not working with the current nodes.. But after a night of nearly no sleep trying to troubleshoot I woke up dark and late at the peak time of 8pm with some ideas for potential solutions.. The second of the two solution ideas was to add a faux lower leg bone and separating the IK node into two separate nodes per leg. One driving the fake lower leg and real thigh while the other was driving the entirety of the lower leg. This is what I settled on and is visible in the video, is it perfect? Not even close, is it good enough for IK on legs the player can't see? definitely..

Last thing of note, I know I've been doing Day # formats but don't expect that to stay consistent at all I nearly burned myself out considering most of what is here is technically from one day...

[rei-makes-big-robo]

Day #3: I have slept for 4 hours and it hurts

Why do we use AM and PM? It leads to really wacky stuff like ah yeah I went from waking up at 8pm to waking up at 12pm, which makes it sound like I slept an extra 4 hours but in reality I slept for 4 hours and woke up 8 hours earlier than I did the prior day... Time standards are wack af I guess... Anyways onto real stuff, I reused some bits of the IK scripts with some tweaks to drive the gun arm to align with what the player is looking at. This works way better than I was expecting especially with the FOV changing with velocity now. The gun arm is gonna look a little weird once the "shooting" mechanics are in for reasons I'll leave a mystery for now, but hey when has a video game gun ever worked in a way that made complete sense? Next steps are to start some basic UI work and then I'm gonna try to block out a level to test some more mechanics I need to implement.

[rei-makes-big-robo]

Little bonus clip from the external camera used for IK testing.

[crystal-faerie]

Was thinking I wasn't going to have any luck bone hunting today and 15 minutes before we left I found this guy. 😍😍😍 #deerskull #skull #bonehound #bones #bonehunter #railway #railroad #traintracks