This marks the 10th weekly and first first bi-weekly blog so far. Here’s what happened:
Weapon System
The weapon system has gotten a great momentum, albeit with a few visual bugs. There’s still the view bob and view kicking to add but it’s working as intended even on the current multiplayer.
Unity 4.6
As some of you may know, Unity 4.6 open beta has been released to the public, which brings in the new GUI system as part of the upgrade. With that said, we didn’t have much time to fully experiment with, but from what we’ve seen so far, it’s a great GUI system, can interact with codes without a problem. The new GUI was waited by many due to its great responsiveness, scalability and anchoring. Expect some GUI work with done for the next port. This is partially one reason why we didn’t intend to show it them in any video of yet. The deprecated UI system in Unity is pretty awful to work with. But not anymore.
Unity 5
Along Unity’s 4.6 announcement, Unity 5 has also been released for a select of testers. That said Unity 5 comes brings a ton of features that we really need. First of all a a 64b-it edition, meaning it wouldn’t crash because of hitting the memory count in 32-bit. Another beneficial update would be a rewritten physics code, with PhysX 3.3, along with a better working cloth simulation system and much more. It’s said to be twice as fast, which is what we desperately need.
You’ve seen some of our work using the Lux shader. From where we stand now, I would say it’s best to hold it off until Unity 5 gets released. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be preparing the assets be used with its PBR shader. It’s best to have the chance to test it out to find the “perfect formula” to go with. The physically based shading that Unity 5 introduces is being part of the standard shader, along with the lighting renderer, Enlightened, which powers engines such as Frostbite, which powers titles such as Battlefield 3 and 4.
If you’re interested to what Unity 5 will bring, check out this year’s keynote:
Lockpicking
Progress on the lockpicking went well, we’ve added a dice roll system to it, meaning you’d unlock or fail unlock a door based on the random dice roll.
Feeding
I’ve started working on the feeding system, along with the bloodbar pool. So far it’s a rough version but it does what it supposed to: suck out the life of an innocent (or not innocent) victim and remove a point from Humanity if you kill an innocent victim. There’s still the animations to get done, and they are not the most friendliest animations to work with, so there’s a lot of hacks that need to be implemented to get that “look and feel”.
Multiplayer
More progress has been done on the multiplayer, integrating the weapon system to fully work. There’s still a lot of work left to do but hopefully we’ll get to showcase some of the new feature very soon.
Quake 3 Movement
What makes VTM:B to feel different from any typical RPG game is the movement code. Since Source is based off Quake, it’s what makes the player to move in such a manner. It’s something that makes it feel more genuine than the character movement physics we currently have, bringing it closer to its original system. It’s also something the speedrunners will definitely appreciate.
Physically Based Rendering Ready Weapons
Forum member Iraito has done a great job with recreating some of the weapon models so far with higher detail, all of them being PBR ready.
AI
With that said, a lot of work has been done on the AI system. We’ve been experimenting with RAIN, and from what we’ve gathered, it seems to be a very solid behaviour state based AI system. It allows not only A* pathfinding as our initial AI system did, but it also can use sophisticaled behaviour trees to handle any combat and non-combat activities, which is crucial for all the animation driven movements and attacks, each behaving uniquely.
Summary
A lot of game mechanic and multiplayer stuff have been done throughout the week. The reason why there hasn’t been as many contents as anticipated because we’re gearing towards something big project wise, which is all in due time.