Hello Kines and Kindreds. This is going to be a short one, possibly the shortest. There were some unfortunate circumstances happening in my life which I won’t be entering into too much detail, involving a funeral of a distant family member. Even so, the show must go on.
 

Playable Characters

As we discussed in the prior blog post, character creation for a game such as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines would be ideal, however the effort to this would be tremendous and cannot be fully achieved without the help of the community once we’re comfortable enough with the measurement and skeleton rig necessary to carry on not only player movements but cutscenes as well.
 
For a backup, and a much wiser approach for a faster release time, it would make sense to keep the original characters, however improving them is a must if we plan to keep them. Here are some early progress screenshots on some of the improvements done to the models. Textures are disabled to showcase the details on the mesh themselves, since the original ones are low quality, it will take some time to find replacements to match the old textures or improve upon them.
 
Some of the improvements seem minor or subtle, such as the hard edges around the shirts and pants, with noticeable smoothing.

Here’s one render of the “improved” female Brujah model, still lots of work on the texture but it’s much cleaner now:

Some of the Santa Monica props are getting revamped as well, hopefully with proper textures for the following weeks:

Cutscenes

There’s one thing that I wished to talk about a while ago, and those are the cutscenes. They were indeed a more weaker part of Bloodlines, first of all, because of the famous directional walk animation when the player is walking, and secondly, the animations themselves feel less realistic. I feel that having proper cutscene setups would improve the atmosphere to the game, because in the original game as much as it tried, it didn’t deliver the sort of quality one would expect for cinematic cutscenes.
 

 
One thing you will definitely notice are the way they are animated. Since they seem to be hard driven rather than motion captured, the only way to manually fixing them is to manually exit them within an animation software. We haven’t gone far into this process yet because we would want to have them translated for the newer rig instead.
 
I always had problems on getting the cutscene animations to play properly on the Source engine, mainly because of the way they were set up. The original game shipped with a modified version of logic_choreographed_scene entity that handled the player animations, but the main advantage it had, was that it was not only able to play the sequences within the vcd (scene) file but also to animate up to 4 actors within one animation file. Meaning it would require less entity and work to get them play properly. In Source I had to go through a lot of the regular choreography scene entities and set them up for each actors using them which resulted into a lot of issues, since at some occasions they were playing the animations, on other occasions they’d randomly stop working.
 
However in Unity setting them up is rather painless. We can achieve it by getting the player and the companied actors to play the animation on a specific spot during the animation within the cutscene itself. This allows us to move the characters in place dynamically even if the animation dictates otherwise. Another issue I had with Source because of the rather short animation data length it stored, always resulted the cutscenes that moved far away from its origin to result into all sorts of weird bone issues and more. In Unity it can go away as far as possible.
 
For the cutscenes we use a powerful plugin called MateAnimator that can allow us to apply a cutscene to any object, at any given place, and have access to play any take if the cutscene has more. Also that allows to move multiple objects dynamically while the cutscene plays, just like you’d do in any animation software.

 

Media

Since most of the UI stuff were already covered, doesn’t mean Teemu is resting just yet. He has presented us with another great wallpaper for the fans to grab:

 

Summary

Been a hectic week for us, me with my personal life, while Stephen was out of reach for the time being having his share of work done before jumping aboard. Hopefully we’ll able to bounce back soon.