Changelog 25 In Which A Promise Is Made To Stop Using Lame Allusions To Star Wars Films
TL;DR
Multiplayer testing, new camera system, new character controller and beginning work on a dynamic cover system.
This Week
In the last couple of weeks I’ve run a few multiplayer tests and have built up a big list of usability problems people have complained about.
New Camera controller
This new camera controller now use physical casting to check it’s position into the world does not clip through things. This means that the camera will never position itself on the other side of a wall from your character! There’s still more to do here but already this has been a huge win for usability.
In fact, there’s so much to do in third person cameras I think I could probably spend a couple of months on this topic alone… don’t worry, I don’t plan to! Instead I’m going to do the next best thing and write up a big blog post on designing and building 3rd person cameras. Coming Soon (tm).
New Movement System
The old movement system was really just thrown together to be whatever was easy to build. I ended up with a standard first person movement mode - so your character always faced away from the camera and moved in whatever direction you pressed a key.
The new system is a lot more like a classic third person character controller - you face whichever direction key is being pressed and move forwards. So if you press ‘A’ rather than sidestepping, like the old system, you instead turn to face the left (facing across the camera) and walk in that direction. This kind of system is a lot nicer to use because it means you (the player) can be looking in a different direction to your (the character) movement.
Dynamic Sticky Cover v0.1
I’ve begun work on a dynamic sticky cover system. This system uses a set of physics queries to probe the environment when you’re moving into and around cover, depending on the results controls will be changed in context sensitive ways. For example if you press C (whilst looking at some cover) the character will dive into cover and now your control directions are relative to the cover rather than relative to your camera.
What’s Next?
I need to finish off the dynamic cover system. I’ve also been working on a way to render text in 3D so that I can place context sensitive control hints in world right in front of your eyes and that should be done in a couple of weeks.