Progress Update #51 (Patreon)

Hey, I got things working in unity! But there were many hurdles along the way :p

I found two really good shaders for unity that mimic the PS1 look. The first one is free and it's just a simple material that you apply on your object, there's no script or anything like that, very easy to use and the animation looks great, the only problem is that it doesn't support lights, shadows or ambient occlusion. So I opted for the second one that has a lot more features but it also has a lot of issues and incompatibility with other scripts and plugins... but as long as I have my lighting I'm cool with it.

I've been keeping the polycount of the 3D objects very low, especially the environments, and after bringing the Valentine scene over to Unity I realized that it just doesn't work out with the ps1 shader. Because it distorts the textures of the object based on the mesh surface and camera distance. So this happens when you get close:

And if your geometry has no divisions the texture just warps completely, and that is a big problem with the buildings because the cameras get really close to the surface. So I had to go back to Maya and manually increase the polycount of everything. That was fun... At least I was able to use the old low poly scene as a mesh collider.

After the environment was all set up, I found a really nice 3rd person shooter template in the asset store, which has an AI system, health system, character inventory, melee, etc. It took a lot of trial and error, but I was able to figure out the scripts and get it working with my characters. Things would have been a lot easier if you could just copy multiple components in Unity, but apparently,this is not possible. So every time I bring a new NPC into the scene I have to manually copy 30 different scripts, one at a time. Couldn't find any solutions online, every tutorial I watch people do the same thing, and I'm just sitting here thinking: "there has to be a better way", but I don't know enough about Unity yet, so I guess I'll just have to suffer a little bit more for now :p

One thing that I noticed with Unity is that nothing seems to just work out of the box, there's a lot of tweaking and experimenting, and I'm not sure if it's just the ps1 scripts screwing things up, or maybe I should have been using an older version of Unity... Though there was one thing that was easy to set up, the dynamic bones! when I first saw the thumbnail it looked like some anime jiggle physics bullshit, but it's actually a really good solution for hair and cloth physics, and surprisinglyit was the easiest thing to set up in this whole project, you just select the root joint and the script does the rest. Hair simulation is not that easy in Maya, I can tell you that much!

Btw, I was going to post more gifs, but each one was like 12MB, so I made some webms instead, check out the attachmentsif you want to see more of the game in motion.

I still have to figure out some of the animals, because the TPS template only supports animations for humanoids, and I'm not sure how I can integrate my own custom animations or if they will be compatible with the scripts. Last time I messed around with the animation controller it just broke everything and the game wouldn't even run, so I'm still figuring out what to do.

I really wanted to have this episode finished this month, because I think it's the perfect video for April fools day. But now I'm not sure if I can do it, I might need an extra week or two, I'm gonna try my best though! So the next post could be an update or it could be the finished video, it's all going to depend on how long it takes me to get the horse working.