Update #17 (Procedural Animation and Level 18) (Patreon)

It's your (probably) most favourite Swedish-named developer hopefully with some consistent updates.

We have three main key highlights for you today and a lot of interesting updates for things to come.

Highlights:

⋅ Nostalgia submission polls have now closed and results are now in!

⋅ Level 18 Environment rework (Leaks coming soon)

⋅ Procedural Animation update for entity in Level 18! (More info in "The Details")

Coming Soon:

- Nostalgic submission results showcase: We're planning on releasing the results for those on Thursday.


- New level submission contest coming soon planned for Tuesday: With how much progress we've been making, it gives us a great reason to hear your input and tell us which level you want to see next!


- Level 18 Environment leaks: It seems to us that the nostalgia is spreading to myself and the dev team... This sentiment might spread to you by next Friday.


- Level 18 entity leaks: It seems there has been an entity scurrying around this place... It's hard to get photos but we think we might get be able to get some for next Wednesday


- Official Gameplay Trailer (Trailer 2) coming soon!: Expected release will be just under two weeks. I cannot lie about how excited I feel for people to see the fruits of our great artists!

The Details (for nerds):

We've got some pretty advanced stuff to talk about this week! 

Procedural Animation in UE5 has been on my todo list for a while now. And now that we've gotten to it let's dig into it! First, an overview of what we're trying to accomplish: A fully  independent animation system made in UE5 without using any baked animations that will read the environment around itself and walk, crawl, and (sortof) climb with perfect collisions to wherever it wants to go. 😐 It's quite a big one. Now let's start! 

First thing on our way is setting up our first line traces to find the ground underneath each foot. So, we setup a line trace that will trace down from the bone just above the foot to see where the ground is below us. After we set this up for every foot we now have a way of detecting where the collision is for the ground directly below us and we can set each of our feet to stay locked to that point. Now we have a creature that we can move the body of freely while the legs animate to connect the body to the feet. That is until we move past the reach of the legs... So next let's figure out where the feet need to move to once the body starts moving! First thing do to here is look at *references* and see how all creatures walk. Everything that can walk will always place it's foot ahead of its body once it starts walking. So, when we calculate where our foots next position is going to be, we need to predict where the next good place to rest our foot is based on not only where the body is but it's velocity as well. To do that let's now set our feet to move once they get to a certain distance from their connecting bone to the body. Now we can calculate the base position under the body that the foot would come to and multiply it by a fraction of its velocity to get a predicted position for each foot. Now (after some more checking of the the foot path for collisions), if we set up a few lerps for our animation between foot points and test our work so far... We have an ice skating creature!  Now all we need to add is a some vertical value to lerp to when the foot is midway through its journey to have an actual step. After doing that, we have a basic walk that will work on uneven ground and stairs. Now that the base of our procedural animation is built all we need to do is add some location and timing variation to get some more natural looking animation. And finally we have the horizontal aspect to worry about. I won't go too in depth for this one because it is the same basic concept as our walking animation just on a horizontal plane with just a few changes to different traces. Now after we get a quick system up that will pick which point we will move our feet/hands to (out of our next vertically checked position and our next horizontally checked position), we have a perfectly working walking/crawling and (sort of) climbing procedural Animation system! (abeit still a bit clunky and robotic) All there is to do now is add even more variation to almost every aspect of our movement and we have a convincing animation system that is able to adapt to changing room sizes, walls, tunnels, and possibly... Jungle Gyms...