Friday Devblog 3

Another week, another set of updates to talk about, even when we are light on media.
 

Level properties
 
Gameplay is very crucial, and in order for the player to be able to interact with the world, we need to implement those features from scratch. Since we’re aiming for modding to be as close to Source in terms of how these entities communicate with themselves, it’s important to set them in a manner that is as user friendly as possible.
 
One of the major differences between the way Source handles entities and with Unity handling its GameObject, are the way they are initialized. In Source, in order to give a certain function to a entity, we tie that entity to a specific entity. For instance, if we were to place a model into the map that has no purpose other than behave as a prop, we set it to be a prop_static for a static prop and from there we select which model we want to use. But on Unity, and on most modern engines, it’s the other way around. We add a mesh into the game that in turn creates a GameObject rendering given mesh. In order to add any given behaviour or purpose to this game object, we attach a stript to it that handles that. Since we attach scripts, we can attach as many scripts as we like, while also keeping them modular.
 
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From Source to Unity

For working with Source engine for these past few years, there’s only one thing to add: it’s horrendous. Source was built on the Quake branch, from which GoldSource was born and later on followed by Source. There was always an imprecation with creating mods on Source. The time it takes to develop a game can add up to months, even years compared to what modern engines can do. Unfortunately, Source always suffered and were criticized for their “painful to use” tools and the lack of providing a fully fledged engine and SDK to work with.

This is when we said, enough is enough. Bloodlines Resurgence always suffered because of that. Lack of programmers experienced with the Source engine, facing difficulties with engine branch versions, painful tool sets. The art pipeline is not much friendlier either. Creating models need to append to the QC files, compiling and so forth, but we will get into these details soon. It’s a lengthy process without leaving much reward behind it. Because of these, the project never really lived up to its expectations: to have a fully ported version of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The only reason why multiplayer was taken into consideration rather than the single-player due to the expectations that are required for a fully finished RPG game: skill points, game mechanism, inventory system and so on.

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