A THUG'S ASCENSION Devblog

We progressed with the NPCs and finally completed the equipment systems, and made awesome dynamites to demonstrate the latter. ADITYA CHANDRA  (Lead Developer) I completed the equipment system! What does that mean? It means now you can pick up, equip and drop/throw nearly any object you come across. This is something I wanted a lot in the final game, just because the idea seems extremely cool. I came up with another cool idea to demonstrate this: a freakin' dynamite. So this is how it is: you go to a dynamite, you pick it up just like you'd do with any other interactable that can be picked up, you go to the inventory and equip it by clicking on its slot (just like the weapons) and then you go anywhere and drop it by clicking the left-mouse button. To make it go boom, you simply fire on it, once. The dynamite will explode, play some nice VFX/SFX, deal damage to any nearby objects and apply a huge  force to them 0.05 seconds later. Also, I worked a l...

We managed to get our cars up and running, plus also some really basic A.I. for use as a base for going ahead. ADITYA CHANDRA  (Lead Developer) Sorry once again for missing another week... this time I had a math  olympiad thingy. Don't worry as I won't be having any more olympiad thingies until February now. Also, it's Tuesday today, 'cause my router was down yesterday. So now straight to the progress... I got the cars done this week. They can be properly entered, exited and most importantly driven . The car is an interactable. They have a proper rigidbody unlike the player and they're mostly based on Unity's standard car except I did a refactor on the wheels and tweaked around with the motor. By the way I'm using the buggy D.K. sent for getting the functionality done, without focusing on texturing this time. The wheels are all separate objects as children of the car and they turn and rotate with the car's movement. The wheels are des...

We completed the basic weapon and equipment systems, started work on the vehicles and made a starter building. We also discussed about multiplayer mechanics. ADITYA CHANDRA (Lead Developer) Sorry for the delay for this blog... I had a science olympiad thingy (nailed it). Other than that, I completed the basic weapon system, started work on equipment mechanics and also began coding the logic for the vehicles. WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT First of all, I textured the assault rifle Diwangshu sent and gave it a classic look. I also wrapped it in dirt so it kinda looks a bit hardcore-ish now. Cool. I coded some cool logic into the gun. I have an EquipmentManager now which holds all guns. It's responsible for the switching as well. Here's how you switch guns: you pick up a gun, you open your inventory, you click on the slot with the gun and it will show up in your equipment list (that is still to be U.I.'d). The gun can either fire automatically or non-automaticall...

Why should holidays always mean an outing? It's not that we're against it or something, but it takes a lot of development time away. We managed to get stuff done nonetheless. ADITYA CHANDRA   (Lead Developer) After playing around with the player, I'm getting that same old nasty error where pushing things around and aiming on the stairs triggers the ragdoll with console stating the reason for that as the force threshold was exceeded. The physics component that reads force (as relative velocity) sits as a child of the Player, and maybe my method of reading force is wrong... private void FixedUpdate()     {         if (transform.GetChild(4).gameObject.GetComponent<Rigidbody>().velocity.magnitude >= threshhold)         {             Debug.Log("RAGDOLL! Force threshold exceeded");             gameObject.GetComponent<AnimToRagVV>().EnableRagd...

Another month gone. It has been almost one and a half months since development on  A Thug's Ascension  began, and what have we got? A badass player who can walk, run, crouch, go prone, jump, pick stuff up, interact with the environment and most importantly, become a ragdoll. ADITYA CHANDRA  (Lead Developer) I started out by cleaning code and on the way I created a cool GameManager that... well, manages all stuff in the scene. My code is now solid and a lot easier to understand because it is now cleaned and has a lot of //comments . Then I gave the player an identity with a cool CharacterProfile script (that is supposed to sit on all other characters in the game as well). It has fields for name, class (standard, V.I.P., etc. (more to be added)), type (player, ally, enemy, civilian, police, etc.), gender and some values like strength and speed. I also created a simple crosshair. Then I just quickly opened up the profiler and did some Thanyok stuff to decrea...

He...he...(SNIFF!) HE LEARNED TO CROUCH, GO PRONE AND AIM AT STUFF! OUR BABY!!! And yeah, sorry for being a day late on posting this blog. ADITYA CHANDRA  (Lead Developer) So the first thing I did this week was to continue with the PlayerController for the player. One thing I did was to clean code and optimize it, and a part of it was to convert the string values that control the animations of the character, 'acts', into enums. I was reading this Unity Manual article about optimization of scripts the other day, and they said strings are to be avoided wherever possible as using strings subsequently creates objects, which is definitely not the best way of doing things. And since it is essentially prudent that I should at least be able to understand my own code, I went ahead and renamed act1  to Pose , act2  to Movement  and act3  to Action , and then moved some stuff around. I also added a lot of //comments  to make my code easy-to-understand. ...

This week we managed to have a lot of sweet progress. ADITYA CHANDRA   (Lead Developer) I was able to pull off some awesome stuff too. For starters, the animation web for the humanoid character's animator was extended (and thus now it's even more scary): This now includes all the humanoid animations and makes sure that all animations can transition to the correct ones efficiently. After this (and making sure everything works), I made a script to control these transitions, and to determine what animation to play. What animation is being played is determined by three string values, act1 , act2  and act3 . These 'acts' work in synergy to determine the correct animation. For example, if act1  is 'walk',  act2  is 'crouch' and act3  is null, the 'CrouchWalk' (walking while crouched) animation will be played. Also note that this script, the 'AnimController' is and will be the only script that has permission to access the animator...

What's up, countrymen? First of all, sorry for missing posting the blog posts in the past 2 weeks, the lead developer Aditya Chandra had his mid-term examinations at the factory school. ADITYA CHANDRA  (Lead Developer) As for me, I couldn't do much because of my exams which just ended, as discussed earlier, but I still managed to do some stuff when I was free. First of all, some more bugs in our physics and render systems were discovered and fixed (more like destroyed ), and the now animated and U.V. mapped humanoid was finally brought into the Unity game engine, where all of its animations were first defined...: ...and then they were all painstakingly organised into our animation web for the humanoid's animation controller (powered by Unity's Mechanim). BEHOLD (it may need some work): That was all for now. I'm sure next week's progress will definitely be much better than the last three weeks (mostly because we have a seven-day holiday from scho...

Hola people! This week was obviously something else, we managed a ton of progress like the last week! ADITYA CHANDRA  (Lead Developer) Last week I was busy animating the humanoid characters. This week, I started U.V. mapping the character so that I could texture him. The character was U.V. mapped in Blender, where it was made, rigged and animated (...and painfully experimented upon). It was not easy: first I attempted unwrapping the mesh to get a U.V. map without marking the seams, "It's just a cube-y little guy. What could possibly go wrong?" But when the unwrapping was done, what I got on the U.V. layout was something that looked like a potato. Learning from that mistake, I went on, carefully marked the seams, ignoring all the unnecessary vertices, and then unwrapped. This time, it wasn't a potato... it was a mashed, rotten potato. Frustrated, I then just selected all the vertices and clicked on 'Unwrap'. This time, I got something I could us...