May 12th Weekly Update (Patreon)

Happy Mother's Day!!!!

Busy week!

I managed to get the village girl's textures and retopo completely done.  There were a few parts that were a bit higher poly then I wanted, so I had to go back and retopologize those parts.  Once that was done I was able to get her textures all baked out.

I showed more pictures to patrons earlier this week, but those aren't appropriate for public posts!

I also experimented with showing Meridiana's equipped weapon, or at least some of her gear on the model.  I started the test with her knife, as its something that the player will always have.   

I made a sheath for it, and got it positioned how I'd like it.   Not sure if I'll be keeping it there, or swapping it out or what, I need to do some more tests on stuff.

As you can probably see in the above, I added a new ability that involves a wand.   This is my first attempt to use the previous logic I wrote for aimable weapons that can repeat fire.  It seems like an easy thing to do, Unreal was made for guns after all.  With my set up, however, it was a little more work to get it working smoothly.

Finally, I was trying to tweak the melee abilities, to make them feel better for the player.  This mainly resulted in me speeding them up.  However I noticed because the animations are so quick, the physics would sometimes fail to register hits.  As this is the opposite of fun, I implemented a hit detection system that I heard about through Chivalry.  In this system, traces are done to see if anything is between the last position of the weapon, and the current position.  Its a lot more accurate, and allows for fast animations.   

Luckily, it ended up being faster to write then I had feared, and implementation seemed to go off without a hitch.  

All and all I got a lot done this week, and I'm excited to keep working!
Thanks again for the support, you guys have a great week!