Hey kines and kindreds, another Friday Devblog. I’m going to try to keep this one short, since our freedom demands that!
 

Character rig setup

Since we know Troika’s history was an unpleasant one, as my goal in sharing this is not to discredit anyone, or downplay the seriousness of what happened, but to pinpoint the errors the original game suffers, we believe it’s important to focus on the asset side as much as the coding side, in order to get it done right. Because of the events that happened during the team’s development, it let a lot of their character and NPC models to be rushed and with poor weight mapping, it’s important for the newly transitioned rigs to not only use a better rig skeleton, but also to have them properly weighted. It’s a tremendous effort to begin with, replacing all the character models with newly remade ones along with weighting them one by one.
 
To fasten the process we use advancedSkeleton to set up the rigs from a rig template without too much hassle, allowing us to fix and mirror the chances easily. We’re still trying to find a “proper” solution for this cause, because this will be the final version we will be going with all the models as we progress. It’s important to have the core rig all planned out in order to translate the animations, including the cutscene ones.
 

Character Set up

Because we sorely think a detailed character customization is important, especially for roleplaying, having them set up properly from the beginning is much needed. Thanks to UMA we can implement these features with ease, all with a single base mesh for different genders. Recreating the original playable characters is not an easy task to go through, especially with the amount of characters this game has blessed us with. Fortunately for us, with UMA we can mimic a lot of the varieties of a character based only on its mesh.
 
Features like blend shapes and the use of normal maps and wrinkle maps allow us to further push customization. We like to have as much variety included within the game, as long as they fit within the lore. We’ll be discussing further details regarding the options for character customization in the near future.
 

Game Manager

This week I’ve been working on a game manager along with some rough state manager that handles various scenarios within the game, including the various game modes we’ll be implementing for the multiplayer/storyteller mode. It’s still in its early stage to have anything concrete to demonstrate, but nevertheless it worth mentioning this for those who appreciate the more transparent stuff of game development.
 

Weapons and Items

The weapons system is also being re-coded too. We’ve only just started this due to the base we have set up, to fully work with the editor in mind without the need to have it redone twice.
 
It’s getting re-designed to handle the weapons and ammo in a more efficient way than it was in Bloodlines, but also allowing the modders to easily create new items/weapons with further customization, from weapon range firing to the damage it does throughout various skills. Different kinds of ammo loaded would obviously have the damage type associated with them, resulting in damage on hit.
 
The inventory set has also been receiving an improvement. For instance, you can make as many inventory sets as you want, and save those as an external file, but each character may only have 1 Inventory set; the set is dynamic, so any items they pick up or whatnot will be put into the inventory set. This can be used on NPCs too in order to create or use it as a base template to begin with.
 
Here’s some very rough draft of the various item types and weapons diagram:

 

More UI goodness

Once again Teemu has surprised us with these fantastic concept UI. It’s worth nothing that a lot of the concepts you still may vary and change drastically in the future. We are aware the concerns many of you had over the new UI for Project Vaulderie, but we can safely say we will also grant the option to switch between the old and new.
 
Check out his amazing work on the UI concepts at http://teemuandreas.com/vaulderieui/. There’s a lot of nice things you’ll definitely enjoy watching so it’s worth the look.
 

Summary

Weapon system and game management is going well, while we know we promised more multiplayer news, fear not, we’ll be having something neat for the next week instead since we opted to have something more polished to demonstrate! Rushing something is not a good thing, especially since most of us work on our free times or on multiple projects.
 
Even with a short entry we hope this will compensate the cause, courtesy of Teemu:

 
Happy 4th of July in the US out there!