Games Mechanic, Weapon Swapping

#pragma strict

public var Sword :GameObject;
public var normal : GameObject;
public var Advnce : GameObject;

var Click : boolean;
var Swing : boolean;

function Start()
{
animation.Play("Idle");
Swing = false;
Click = false;
Sword.tag = "None";
}

function Update() 
{
if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0)&&Swing == false)
{
SwordSwing();
}

if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown (1)&&Click == false &&!animation.IsPlaying("Stab"))
{
Debug.Log ("Pressed RMB");
Weaponswap();
}

}

function SwordSwing()
{
Swing = true;
Sword.tag ="Weapon";
animation.Play("Stab", PlayMode.StopAll);
yield WaitForSeconds (1);
Sword.tag = "None";
Swing = false;
}

function Weaponswap()
{
Click = true;

Advnce.renderer.enabled = !Advnce.renderer.enabled;
normal.renderer.enabled = !normal.renderer.enabled;
Click = false;
}

Big addition to the weapon swinging script, additions are in blue, What these additions do is swap the visuals of the weapon the player is holding on a right click. Whilst purely a visual effect as is, later iterations will add in more functionality like higher damaging weaponry.

Also I made this sword and rack.

Just a piece of window dressing right now, but I intend to incorporate this as a form of inventory, where weapons will be placed in the hub scene when not in use.

Worldbuilding Detailing #1

Work on adding in some details to the underside, namely a hilariously oversizes grabbing claw (That's actually there, I'm not making this up), Pipes and pillars to the inside of the bay and outer crenelations.

Actual visual proof that THE CLAW is a legitimate feature of the work.

Normal Mapping

After returning to Maya to reattempt to bake a texture map, I produced this. It's from a roundabout workflow including baking a height map in Xnormal and producing the normal map from that. It's not the best way to go about it but until I can get a refresher in making a normal map in Xnormal without the potentially useless middle step of making the height map.

Star Destroyer Texturing test

 After a terrible experience attempting to bake textures using both Xnormal and Maya's transfer Maps function, I roughed out some admittedly terrible placeholder textures. This is also in tandem with an automatic UV unwrap, in order to gauge the model's complexity better.

Modelling Update

Quick update on the work I've done today. Some minor cleaning up of the topology, attaching the top and bottom sides together, and adding in the basic details of the underside along with some placeholder turrets. These will need to be amended after merging them into one object killed the heirarchy that had been set up. Next up is to work on the rear of the ship.

Mech concept #1

Character and weapon concepts for a to-be-fleshed out game concept.

Worldbuilding Developmental Sketches

Side profile sketch of Star Destroyer, used to initially map out where separate textures will go.

Detailed bridge study, with intent of using as a texture reference

Sketches and musings on shape and design. I also thought of using Detail Maps, however having looked at how they work in Unity, I have decided against this.

Squishies

Character and style sketches for a personal game project about stuffed Toys.

Musings on how to show emotion and moods in a stylised way when the only common facial feature across characters are eyes.

Helmet Sketch

A developmental sketch for a costume for the MMCC, a star wars charitable organisation.
The Mandalorian Mercs Costuming Club.

Worldbuilding - Modelling.

Current status of the Star Destroyer  model. The top of the main body is finished, with only the bridge and details left to do. Then I will flip this segment to form the underside, and trim it down as needed. Then once the model is done to a basic level, I will work onto it in subsequent passes.

After the work above was completed, as well as some major parts of the topology that I missed were added. Next is to build the middle, bottom and back.

Games Mechanic concepts

One of the enemy types on the list of possible enemies was named Box O' Rats. As this seems somewhat simple and something that is literally just a box of rats seems somewhat generic, I took it as a personal side project to work on when I was taking a break from the numbingness of scripting. As I wanted to err away from a crate full of rats, I designed this, which whilst is a crate of rats, wold work somewhat different in gameplay, instead moving around the player rapidly like a chariot. This is added to by the inclusion of a rat in stylised greek hoplite armour.

After the enemy types were signed off, I needed another side project to work on outside of scripting. As such I took on the role of making as many weapon and armorsets as possible. Whilst it's a long time away from being needed, a large library of possible concepts when the time comes will be useful. In this current Work In Progress, I am attempting to create one basic weapon and two spin offs using the basic weapon shape and style.

Games Mechanic - State of the Game address.

Since the last scripting update, a few things have been updated. The main body of text is below, hidden using a readmore for the sake of blog readability.

World Buildin Final Submission

Final piece for World building  assigenment #1 Fifteen minutes to render the weapon and then a weeks worth of evenings painting over the render.

Pleased with the design and the fluff I came up with it. Silhouette is boxy and imposing, if a little simplistic. Colours are solid, using a diluted form of blue / orange contrast to bring out details.

The name Primator was a spin on the term Decimator, since Decimation is the removal of one-tenth, Primation would be the removal of all. This train of thought could lead it to possibly sound rather imposing. However the 'Primat' part is phonetically similar to 'Primate', hence the tagline 'It's got nothing to do with monkeys.' Whilst I did ponder rethinking the name, the fact that people are more likely to think of Monkeys than an obscure faux-Latin phrase lends to the atmosphere I was trying to achieve. The weapon is a farce, much too bulky and excessive for a realistic setting, and the name giving off vibes of having been dreamt up via committee only lends to this

In the event of Blogger shrinking down the image, click here for a full sized version.

World Building - January 16th

After finding a very comprehensive album of a person's attempt at a scratchbuild Star Destroyer, I used it as a reference to start drawing out ideas for how this model will fit together. The bridge is a curious part of the design, as it will be the only place on the ship with a dedicated texture map due to its specific place and nature.

To maintain consistency the texture used to make the bridge will be produced in the same way as the texture on the tiling maps, possibly even utilising elements of the tiling maps to further consistency.

To increase my library of references, I made a VLC playlist of the three original Star Wars films, and skipped through to find all the sequences containing them, and took screenshots.

Top Row, third on the left is a screencap of the Death Star's surface, but as the aesthetic is same across the two it is still useful for texture references.

Navmeshes

public var Target : Transform;


GetComponent(NavMeshAgent).destination = Target.position;

Appending these two lines to the enemy script allows it to navigate the world. After baking a navmesh, the dummy object will move towards the player. This created an issue where the dummy cube would ignore colliders and sit in the same spot as the player. To solve this issue I applied a NavMesh Obstacle to the player.

As the dummy cube can now not reach the player's space it will stop just short, which is still close enough for the player to interact (read: Stab) with it. To reduce any stress on the machine later on, the portion of the script dealing with enemy death now contains the line

  GetComponent(NavMeshAgent) .enabled = false;

This means that the dummy cube will no longer attempt to path towards the player from under the game plane.

games mechanic notes - Scripting

#pragma strict

public var Sword : GameObject;
public var enemyhealth : int = 10;

function OnTriggerEnter (Sword : Collider)
{
if (Sword.tag == "Weapon")
{
enemyhealth --;
Sword.tag = "None";
}
}

function Update () 
{
if (enemyhealth == 0)
{
transform.position.y = -100;
}
}

This script deals with the interaction between the player and the enemy.

#pragma strict

public var Swing : boolean;
public var Sword :GameObject;

function Start()
{
Swing = false;
Sword.tag = "None";
}

function Update() 
{
if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0)&&Swing == false)
{
SwordSwing();
}
}

function SwordSwing()
{
Swing = true;
Sword.tag ="Weapon";
animation.Play("Stab", PlayMode.StopAll);
yield WaitForSeconds (5.5);
Sword.tag = "None";
Swing = false;
}

It works closely in tandem with this script, which deals with sword swings and activating the players weapon.

World Building 2 - Notes Page One

The first of many sketch sheets for this project. Containing musings on the types of textures I will need to make, how to handle the engine glow, details such as the topology of the spheres and the turrets, and a rough outline of how I think the model's topology will fall.

Games Mechanic II - Scripting

Forwards and backwards kinda day today. Made this test character controller, the sword has an animation on it so it's arguably fancier than the normal character controller.

I then attempted to rough together a combat script, but failed to get the needed interaction between the player and a rough enemy cube.

World Building #1 - Variations #2

During my formative assessment, it was brought up that with changes made on the model sheet, namely tweaks and adjustments to make the shape more interesting, my existing variations sheet was not as useful as it once was. To amend this I have made this extra sheet with a better illustration. I have also tweaked and changed the variations to create a wider range of styles, whilst culling those that were too outlandish.

world building Texture musing

After pondering how to assemble the tiling textures, I produced these very rough concepts. The central area was repeated around it, to allow for overrunning of the rough overlapping shapes. This was then neatened up and fixed using the Offset filter in photoshop.

After It was cleaned up, I made a quick and admittedly dirty bump map and tested the texture in Maya.

Apart from some rough edges on the edge of the texture, the process and concept works reasonably well, and will only be improved upon when the workflow is amended to work with Maya Modelling and baking texture maps.

Games Mechanic - Vertical Slice

Mighty Ducks - Arena

For the second, more open brief my group has decided to produce a game that is similar to a gladiatorial arena, played from the third person. This led to me thinking about a third person character controller on the Unity Asset Store, the Third Person MMO Controller. After installing the package and testing it out in the demo scene I feel confident in what this asset offers.

With the game concept also needing enemies, pathing will be important. Over Christmas I read up on Unity's NavMesh system, and using the demo scene I baked a Navmesh using the default settings and set up a capsule to follow the player. Whilst a little janky and maybe too smooth and mechanical, it shows promise and means we will not have to use a third party addon.

Worldbuilding 2 - Model Sheet

I came across this whilst searching for reference pictures. This is going to simplify my workflow significantly.

Worldbuilding - Star Destroyer Planning

It's a big undertaking, I knew that when I thought about it. It only really hit me when I saw the abject horror on my tutors face when I said what I was going to do.

So to prepare, I'm going to plan out what and how I'm going to do this.

Modelling will be done in 3DSMax, much to several peoples chagrin. I chose this instead of Maya because the star destroyer is entirely symmetrical, and I am much more fluent in modelling with symmetry in Max than in Maya.

UV Mapping and Texturing will be done in Maya as I am more competent in how Maya handles unwrapping and texturing. As these are both Autodesk products it will be relatively pain free to move the model from one package to the next.

Due to the monolithic scale and size of the model, instead unwrapping how a normal vehicle would be done, I will treat this like a building and utilize tiling textures, this is a different skill set than normal texturing and I plan to make as many of the source textures as I can myself.

References and model sheets will be as follows


Model sheet will be lifted and tweaked from this poster which I personally own. The relevant section will be traced and then scanned. This will just be to get the ship silhouette correct. Details and such will be garnered from these photographs from Lifebuzz. Any further references will be in the form of screencaps of the unofficial Star Wars Despecialised.

As can be ascertained from these, the physical miniature used in filming was incredibly complicated. My final model will not be quite as detailed, even with the choice of platform. Instead the majority of this detail will be garnered from normal mapping on high-fidelity textures. The brief imposes a limitation of 2-30k triangles on the model.


As an additional bonus, I intend to create a small unity build showing off how I envisioned the asset to be used.

 From this desktop wallpaper of admittedly unknown source, one aspect in particular can be ascertained. The underside of the vehicle is much less detailed than the top. However from this screencap from Episode 4 The underside is revealed to be just as detailed, just smoother overall with small divots and trenches. This is suitable for normal mapping, which I intend to use liberally.

World building Project 2

So, to carry as I mean to go on I have decided to stop in-uni work on the first Worldbuilding project as that has over-run and as such any time I devote to it now will eat into time I could be devoting to the second project.

So it would make sense if I were to make a simple, easy game-ready model so that there's less chance of this second one over-running and putting me even further behind.

Some would even go as far as to say that it's the only sane option for someone in my position.

I'm not one to agree.

Star Wars is a big passion of mine, and I am eagerly waiting to see what J.J. Abrams is going do with it.

So I'm going to model a Star Destroyer.

ahaha.