Devlog Technical Challenges (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

It's been a bit slow going as I solve like dozens of technical issues. This is mainly trying to manage larger numbers of AI's in the game.

This isn't something I had tested before but in order to help these areas feel alive I need to put a bunch of other AI characters into the environments.

The biggest one was to speed up how long it took to load characters. If I make every character unique when the level loads it will take too long and parts of the game will involve you going somewhere and back. So what I do is load AI outfits at runtime (for random background characters).

The system is designed to re-use anything that has already been loaded. However, even if it had been loaded it took a couple frames per item per character. So given that characters have about 6-7 different pieces from Hair/undies/glasses it took at it's fastest 7 frames. At 60 frames per second that means it takes about 3 second to load 10 characters (Best case scenario). The problem is if I have like 20 - 30 characters you will see alot of popin as you travel.

I substantially sped that process up just by removing all the little delays.

Devlog The Skirt Saga

I am closing in on a skirt solution. So this has been an ongoing problem for weeks. What I'm trying to do is create a clothing item that works as a skirt and can be integrated as part of a dress. This is something I'm pretty sure people want.

I spent probably another 12 hours trying to solve the issue over the weekend. (This is by the way why games run so delayed. Everything starts out so simple and so smooth and then WHAM into major problems).

So this is how the system works. You have about half a dozen different models. Each one is a different customisable. Then you need to match those on any clothing item. You can see the setup.

That is fundamentally the problem. And the number of solutions I ran down include literally hooking physics up to the skirt.

But still nothing. I rigged a set of dumy legs but in order to get it to work I needed a perfect transition between the fake legs and real body. Unfortunatly in order to rig this so it worked it had a slighly different hip position. That meant it was super obvious where the split line was.

So finally I've hit on a solution. It's still gonna take some work but it was working. Step one is to change the run animation, the current one is very hard to rig a skirt to effectivly. Step two is to keep the skirt right around knee height. Trying to manage the knee bend doesn't give me enough benifit but alot of trouble. 

And finally I've rigged it very very carefully using 3 core bones and a slighly unusual structure. As long as it works for most of the basic animations I think we'll be fine. It doesn't need to work alll the time just so long as it works mostly.

The intention is that I remove the skirt slot and it becomes part of a single total outfit slot. This gives me a little more room to do interesting things. 

I'm also planning on adding an "item" addition to the system. That way I could add a tail or bow as part of the outfit. This has long been a plan but with any luck I'll be able to create a wider variety of outfits this way.

I've been tracking down a bunch of animations and I'm looking at creating a tool to help me distribute some random NPC's to help the environment feel alive. I'm really hoping I can create a living breathing world you can explore. It won't be perfect but just more characters standing around will help it feel like a real place!