Sunday, September 16, 2012
Week 2
This week was dedicated to prototyping controls as well as an animation/state system for controlling the characters.
We had a couple control schemes going around over the past few weeks. While developing the control system, I was originally aiming for a scheme that we had discussed, but were not going with any more. This in and of itself was a non-issue, though it does show that this group depends more on docs than others that I have worked with. I will have to remember to check the documents on the project server periodically to make sure I am on the right track.
Still the control system is pretty easy to change and quickly modify. Unity's Input system is one of it's weak points, in my opinion. It is a deprecated system, that could certainly use some updates. It requires one to manually input each control, and in the case of having multiple controllers on one computer, one must put in each control for each controller, a painful, repetitive task, to say the least. Still, it is done. On the player controller side of things, I built the controls in such a way that the game logic is not looking for particular axis, but rather, the controller accesses objects that encapsulate the accessors to Unity's Input System. This indirection allows control input to be changed without having to access the code, most can be changed in the editor. This will help us modify and scale the controls.
As for the state system, I tried a couple ways of going about it, as well as testing the blending of animations into one another. I tried to keep in mind that we want to try making this work in a networked environment. I will be testing the feasibility of networking this coming week.
Basically the state system will control pretty much every action the player tales in the game. it will also will be responsible for controlling the animations and movement of the characters. The players will always be in a state, when they are knocked down, when they are idling, when they are in the air, as well as one for each attack that they are in. These states will control which state the player can go to from from that state, as well as what inputs take them to said state. For instance, the idle state will allow the player to jump, no other will allow the player to begin jumping, though I may change this to allow jumping to be queued after an attack(so if they hit up while an attack is executing, it will cause them to jump as soon as they are out of that state.) During an attack, the controls are being checked for an input for the next attack. At a certain point in the execution(lets say 50%) the input is not being queried any longer, and at a later point(lets say 75%) the state begins transition (blending animations together, etc). This delay between decision and execution is to allow some time for when we implement networking. This delay could be used to send the next state to the other player. This all theory, that will be put into implementation next week.The state system minimizes what data needs to be sent between clients, so hopefully, this will make it doable. At the same time, networking is certainly not necessary, so if we discover that getting the level of precision we need for a fighting game is not possible, we can scrap online multiplayer all together.
So yeah, controls, states, animation, and stuff. Hopefully the prototype I developed will allow Donny and Eric to test some of their controls and gameplay. We are trying both a brawler like SSBM, and a classic fighter like Tekken/Street Fighter, so we will see how this develops.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Week 1
Anyway, this week has only had a little work on prototypes, sadly. A great deal of our time has been discussing and merging the different ideas we had into one set of mechanics to test together. My time was spent setting up our repo, and doing some quick work looking into the possibility of making our game in 2D.
Personally, after working on animation in 2D, I am personally against the idea.
It really depends on what Rebecca believes she can do in our time, whether she thinks she can do more art in 2D than 3D. It seems for the most part she cares little.
Working in 2D in Unity is interesting. I worked with it on Dungeons of Londree, where are environment was completely done in 2D art. Pieces of it were animated, so I thought I might be able to reuse the code for that. Unfortunately that code was made for a single animation, running through a single texture source. Parts were relevant, but it would need some modification (animation starting a certina frames of the sprite sheet, etc, instead of the whole sheet.
We were also working in M.U.G.E.N and looking at other 2D engines. Donny was looking into it for a prototype of our control scheme. It was not as easy as we had imagined and we spent a good deal of time looking at it's design (as its a famous 2D fighting engine). We looked at editors made for it as well as engines made in other languages (Flash, C++, XNA). There were many things these games had that I had not thought about, including State Settings, Sounds etc. I had thought about them at a game wide level, but one thing that each of these engines made clear was how deeply they were integrated into the animations of the character. Most had sounds played from individual frames, states set from individual frames, as well as having individual hitboxes set up for each frame. I had know about the hitbox issues, but looking at the massive amounts of data for the frames made one thing quite clear: doing 2D meant ALOT of work for the designers. Each frame needs a hitbox, and while many can have the same hitbox, they still need to be set up. This could be reduced programmatically, and I could develop a system to automatically add boxes based on transparency., but it would still need a designer to edit EVERY. SINGLE. FRAME. Not cool.
Working in 2D also means we cannot make full use of Unity's animation system, as well as their collision system. We would still be using the collision system to do the detection of the hits, but we couldn't just attach it to the fists, and wait for a collision, we would have to manipulate a collider box through script every time the frame changed, a huge pain in the ass in comparison, and I think it would be less stable, as if we are changing the size of a collision box and the new box moves into another, we might not get the same effect as we would get with a normal collision that happens with transform movement (so instead of translating something, we would be changing the size of the box, not sure if Colliders would fire their events in this occasion. We could also still use Unity's Animation system, but the frame changing would need to be programmatically created from an editor. It would be the same as any other editor. We would be unable to blend animations together unless we wanted to do a multilayer sprite(body is one sprite set, each arm is a sprite set, etc) which would be an immense amount of work and setup. The alternative of course is a single sprite for animating, but this is an immense amount of work for the artist, as every combination of states that would look different wold need to be drawn, and programmatically we would be unable to blend.
3D on the other hand, allows us to make full use of most of Unity systems. The Engine is built for 3D, and has powerful editor systems. 3D animations would brought in with FBX importer, and we could add sound effects to the animations through Unitys Animation Event System, as well as state changes( or at least some of them, as others would be dealt with elsewhere, like when they get hit or are stunned).
Collisions would be much easier, instead of hit boxes in 2d and changing properties continually, we could add simple colliders to the bones of the rig then check the collider around the fist for hitting another player. This could be set up once, as the colliders would animated with the character.
Animations can also be blended together both with standard blending and additive blending. Unity Animation Scripting. Currently this is all done through script, but I have some stuff from the summer that open it up to be edited a little closely, removing particular transforms from an animation(so we could for instance take the arms of a punch animations and overwrite another animations arms using it).
There are also many shaders that can work for 3D that would be unavailable for 2d(since there would be no vertex data), though there are also pixel shaders that we cannot use on 3d that we could on 2D.
There is the potential of using physics for the knock backs, instead of having them animated. This is not planned at the moment, but a thought to reduce animations, having the falling done through physics would reduce alot of the workload from Rebecca.
I also worked in Unity networking, getting the basic example working and looking at update times. While I am really interested in doing multiplayer, I won't lie, I am quite worried about networking. It doesn't seem particularly difficult, but in a game where timing is EVERYTHING, having event a fraction of a second delay could be critical.
All in all, we got alot of figuing out things done this week. We have more or less decided on going with 3D, we are prototyping the mechanics individually, and the game is coming into its own. Next week we are developing a 3D prototype of the controls on the xbox controller, and I am doing a proof of concept of the animation system for combos.
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Personally, after working on animation in 2D, I am personally against the idea.
It really depends on what Rebecca believes she can do in our time, whether she thinks she can do more art in 2D than 3D. It seems for the most part she cares little.
Working in 2D in Unity is interesting. I worked with it on Dungeons of Londree, where are environment was completely done in 2D art. Pieces of it were animated, so I thought I might be able to reuse the code for that. Unfortunately that code was made for a single animation, running through a single texture source. Parts were relevant, but it would need some modification (animation starting a certina frames of the sprite sheet, etc, instead of the whole sheet.
We were also working in M.U.G.E.N and looking at other 2D engines. Donny was looking into it for a prototype of our control scheme. It was not as easy as we had imagined and we spent a good deal of time looking at it's design (as its a famous 2D fighting engine). We looked at editors made for it as well as engines made in other languages (Flash, C++, XNA). There were many things these games had that I had not thought about, including State Settings, Sounds etc. I had thought about them at a game wide level, but one thing that each of these engines made clear was how deeply they were integrated into the animations of the character. Most had sounds played from individual frames, states set from individual frames, as well as having individual hitboxes set up for each frame. I had know about the hitbox issues, but looking at the massive amounts of data for the frames made one thing quite clear: doing 2D meant ALOT of work for the designers. Each frame needs a hitbox, and while many can have the same hitbox, they still need to be set up. This could be reduced programmatically, and I could develop a system to automatically add boxes based on transparency., but it would still need a designer to edit EVERY. SINGLE. FRAME. Not cool.
Working in 2D also means we cannot make full use of Unity's animation system, as well as their collision system. We would still be using the collision system to do the detection of the hits, but we couldn't just attach it to the fists, and wait for a collision, we would have to manipulate a collider box through script every time the frame changed, a huge pain in the ass in comparison, and I think it would be less stable, as if we are changing the size of a collision box and the new box moves into another, we might not get the same effect as we would get with a normal collision that happens with transform movement (so instead of translating something, we would be changing the size of the box, not sure if Colliders would fire their events in this occasion. We could also still use Unity's Animation system, but the frame changing would need to be programmatically created from an editor. It would be the same as any other editor. We would be unable to blend animations together unless we wanted to do a multilayer sprite(body is one sprite set, each arm is a sprite set, etc) which would be an immense amount of work and setup. The alternative of course is a single sprite for animating, but this is an immense amount of work for the artist, as every combination of states that would look different wold need to be drawn, and programmatically we would be unable to blend.
3D on the other hand, allows us to make full use of most of Unity systems. The Engine is built for 3D, and has powerful editor systems. 3D animations would brought in with FBX importer, and we could add sound effects to the animations through Unitys Animation Event System, as well as state changes( or at least some of them, as others would be dealt with elsewhere, like when they get hit or are stunned).
Collisions would be much easier, instead of hit boxes in 2d and changing properties continually, we could add simple colliders to the bones of the rig then check the collider around the fist for hitting another player. This could be set up once, as the colliders would animated with the character.
Animations can also be blended together both with standard blending and additive blending. Unity Animation Scripting. Currently this is all done through script, but I have some stuff from the summer that open it up to be edited a little closely, removing particular transforms from an animation(so we could for instance take the arms of a punch animations and overwrite another animations arms using it).
There are also many shaders that can work for 3D that would be unavailable for 2d(since there would be no vertex data), though there are also pixel shaders that we cannot use on 3d that we could on 2D.
There is the potential of using physics for the knock backs, instead of having them animated. This is not planned at the moment, but a thought to reduce animations, having the falling done through physics would reduce alot of the workload from Rebecca.
I also worked in Unity networking, getting the basic example working and looking at update times. While I am really interested in doing multiplayer, I won't lie, I am quite worried about networking. It doesn't seem particularly difficult, but in a game where timing is EVERYTHING, having event a fraction of a second delay could be critical.
All in all, we got alot of figuing out things done this week. We have more or less decided on going with 3D, we are prototyping the mechanics individually, and the game is coming into its own. Next week we are developing a 3D prototype of the controls on the xbox controller, and I am doing a proof of concept of the animation system for combos.
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
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