this weekly update just doesn't seem to be happening 🤔

anyway nothing interesting this time - I'm working on maps

here is a large multi level garage 


i'm planning to put it full of raptors - who are back by popular demand
but as you see this one is a desertish variation of them


another gigantic level - a spaceport
it's like an airport but for spacecraft


i'm experimenting around with a 3D skybox


the idea is that a part of the map is rendered inside the skybox
funnily enough implementing it is easier than drawing all the things inside 🤔


also there are driveable forklifts now - so there is at least one driveable vehicle in the game now


not everyone approves if you steal one though

and that's it for now
still plenty of work ahead
but the game is slowly shaping up 🤔

it was 9 days again - i'm only 2 days off  🤔

anyway the one big new thing is the new citrus juicer gun


 the twist is that it's a futuristic citrus juicer repurposed
to be an improvised acid gun  - loaded with large extra acidic citrus 🍋

this gun was my white whale for a while
I had the concept down early and the idea that it should be loaded with lemons
in a way it was going to be a parody of the Unreal 2 Drakk rifle (which was a beam gun loaded with spiders)


there were many iterations - all of them looked good from the side
but it's bloody fps view that didn't seem to happen
I still have doubts about this latest version but it's good enough 🤔


at least the reloading animation turned out good 🤔


moving on I'm doing my best to shape up  my sorry army of weird creatures to be an effective
and possibly scary fighting force 
quake attacks now got replaced by spherical explosion
so you can tell what distance is dangerous
and that jumping won't save you  from the shockwave 🤔


another use for the spherical explosion
the minibosses no longer screw around - we are talking homing ball lightning with giant explosions 🤔


the explosion itself is easy to avoid - when it becomes homing it's a true annoyance 🤔


in fact this might be a good time to call for backup 🤔

 

and so coming up next
it's time to implement your allies 🤔

until next time 👋

only one day off - I'm improving 🤔

as promised here is a post about your allies
you get to command three brothers
who are bank robbers by trade
they used to be four
but the fourth brother was killed by your common enemy
and so you end up teaming up with them 🤔


in this photo the three bois
all three use the same model at different heights
here they are with the default gun - the rocket launcher
learning that shooting rockets at the player is a no no 🤔


here we see the bois as I attempt to add additional weapons and the revolvers scale is off

here are the three bois with the corrected weapon models

here the three bois are guarding that spot - what makes that spot so important nobody knows

here me and the bois are testing the crouch animation

normally the bois just teleport to locations if they get stuck
but that turned out to look like bugs
so I do my best to try and make them find path  to locations
and use teleport as a last resort
here we see a simple node graph
the downside is the path nodes need to be place manually on the level

here we see a test for jumping
it's a fake jump - a bezier curve is calculated from the start and end point
but looks convincing enough

I was worried that the bois might get lost so now they got large markers
that you can also see through walls

on this photo there is a bug - the stapler monsters won't attack until they notice the player
the bois don't see them as a threat either

on this photo one of the boys got shot in the head - but he is ok

here we see that our hike through the minefield was not as success and one of the bois got knocked out
they cannot be killed only knocked out - if this happens you need to get close and revive them
by kicking them back to their senses

and that is all for now
this is the last of the major features done
or at least mostly done
so now it's back to working on levels

until next time 👋

I guess I'm just adjusted to metric weeks (10 days) oh well 🤔
not sure how to make a devlog about this .. it's mostly technical stuff and not much to show

in short: I rewrote the lightmapping code

the unwrapper now works on movers 
this means I can bake shadows into doors, elevators, conveyor belts

secrets are easier to hide

previously moving geometry (the movers)
only supported vertex lights
in my naivety I thought baking the lights into these vertices was enough
but in practice they always stood out

in the case of unwrapping it was mostly refining old code 
but calculating the pixels needed a whole new approach
this was done because on new maps as the maps got bigger
the lightmap preview got a lot worse
as it was only a small 256x256 texture representation
of an ingame 2048x2048 texture

here is a gif of a starship with unfiltered lightmap
comparing the result of the old one and the new one

now the speed up is quite significant
to make the ingame lightmap I made a seperate command line app
this took 2 mins to bake this spaceport map (which my largest most and complex map right now)
the new method finishes in ~8 seconds
this was achieved due to various factors:
- switch to BVH from a 2D grid for storing the triangles
- the new BVH was tread safe and so I increased the threads from 4 to 12
- early exit for the raycast - stop when the first light was hit
- this brought it down to ~10 second
- then the BVH was upgraded to BVH4 and simd was added but it only shaved 2 seconds off

and the preview in the editor skips pixels and blends things together 🤔

the lightmapper in action - not much of a looker 🤔

and the results of all this hard work.. a clean preview - not much of a difference for most maps 🤔

now all is left is to make all these damn levels 😓

until next time 👋

more boring stuff - for others game development seem to be something exciting - I mostly just work 🤔
turns out the real work is with the graphics
and let me tell you - making a main character is 10x harder than anything else 😓
and even with extra attention they end up horrid 🤔

long story short I remodelled Zortch - by hand from top to bottom

you will need to trust me on this - there is little difference 🤔
the neck was adjusted, shirt was tucked in, boots fixed
and now the fingers are animated - might as well 🤔

turns out you need good topology for good animation 

anyway then I made another mistake: how about showing all weapons on the viewmodel

in the previous game no matter what gun you had you held the shotgun
as originally no mirrors were planned and it was only meant for a model for security cameras 🤔

now adjusting 17 models is a lot of work and a lot of weird things happen
here we see Zortch running along with her little walkie talkie

it's both amusing and tragic 🤔

another amusing thing - the redesign of the main villain - the doctor 🤔

he is meant to be a scary figure - but so far he looks like if Gilbert Gottfried was a borg 🤔

or maybe he looks like more of a crazy dentist on the loose? 🤔

if anything he has the attitude 🤔

so only one major model is in need of finishing (the jeep model)
and the rest are optional ones..
alas this is the part where I'm getting tired and not sure what to do next 🤔
character wise it was a smooth sailing - in fact this might be the first fps game
where feature creep was outdone by creature creep 🤔
now only if I was good at making levels too 😓

anyway that is all for now..
until next time!  👋

phew what a week .. I mean 11 days .. still at metric week updates 🤔

first of all take a look at the shiny new trailer:

now believe it or not but the trailer is old news 
it was made before I rewrote the lightmapper
and the movers (doors and whatnot) had lightmaps on them

and among other things recently I managed to finish up the car 
which is the last big feature I insisted on having in the game 🤔

for comparison this was the old car - I thought just driving around a sphere going to work out
and it would be a nice oldschool car

needless to say the driving was not up to standard - but many people loved the design of the placeholder 🤔

the new car got reworked a few times - it's mean to be a combination of a 4x4 jeep with a mini monster truck

the inside looks a bit better but I didn't bother to make a working dashboard

this new one is based on super basic spring physics - the game still has no physics engine 🤔

if you ever go mad as me and try to build your own physics:
update the gravity for all particles first and only then apply the spring constraints
turns out that is the trick to bring it together 🤔
also there is some extra correction - the direction of the car comes from the relation
of the spheres it's made of (6 spheres) and to make sure you drive in a straight line
there is a little cheat added - some of the speed that would deviate you from this dir is cancelled
and that is all needed to make a workable car 🤔

the rest is playing with values until it feels right and you can drift and so on 🤔

of course adding physics to a car has it's problems 🤔

until next time 👋

I got a new record for forgetting to update with 18 days 🤔

but I got a good excuse - working hard on the demo 🤔
well on the mini 1 level  public demo
there will be a true demo for the full game with more levels

the easiest way to find bugs is to try and make a release - and indeed the insanity is reaching new heights

here are some rockets searching for invisible enemies ( the bug is these should only appear after a zone is triggered - but they are already on the map)

some aspects of the game got surreal
here a bug was fixed where the mirror plane cut Zortch in half
now she turns her into siamese rockets - a step up 🤔

the security camera is getting some last minute updates - mostly just sounds and a new noise effect

also a new feature - hall of mirror effects - funnily enough it's possible because it's using earlier technology 

here is an early shot of the demo map

the old version of the map from the top

and it's current look - proof that I'm actually doing something 🤔
and as you see I finally found a place for that cetacean skeleton 🤔

only a matter of days .. and testing will start on the public test version
that I also test myself beforehand 
and then it will be sent to everyone I asked to test
and only after they took it apart and everything is fixed it will
be truly a public test .. 😵

as you can see I'm not leaving anything to chance 🤔

oh well.. back to work..

I need to teach the girls how to get through doors  😓

until next time 👋

the testing is going well - I got a lot of help with testing now
and it was a good idea to not leave it for last this time 🤔

of course it's ironic that the public testing also has a pre-testing phase
but that is the way the cookie crumbles 🍪
it's more of a psychological thing - better not let people exposed to potential big bugs 🤔

soon everyone will can play the demo for real
very soon here on itch
and a few weeks after the game gets through the tedious
approval process on steam 🤔

some highlights on what has been fixed in the past week:

the lightmap generation got fixes - and I completely had to re-lit the map

here is an area without filtering 

there were a lot of mistakes - but mostly with filtering:
- pixels extended to the edge of the image and this broke blurring
- blurring the image without using the triangles for a mask introduced smudging
- I didn't do dot product tests between the light and surface normals
i'm on the fence about this one as I also invented a cheap way for ambient light with not using them
but now everything looks proper and more oldschool 🤔
 

so with the proper normals this whale skull looks a bit weird with hard edges

rocks look a lot less natural but I kind of like it  🤔

there were some major bugs:
- I only saved the first 16 weapon slots from 32 - making the pugon pistol lost in saves 😔
- Zortch was not shown in the guided missile view - I coded it out accidently with the vehicles
- gibs were floating after you loaded a game - their groundpos was not saved
- ladders used dot products wrong to see if you were facing them - dot products seem to be my arch enemy 🤔

guided missile view - Zortch thinks she is in a car 👀

and here it is fixed 🤔

for my next trick I will try and make the gamepad work properly
unfortunately nobody testing has tried it with a gamepad
and I don't play with it much either
so all shenanigans will come out when testing will become public for real 🤔

until next time 👋

and the demo is now ready 👀

is the game on the right track?  🤔
or are there major flaws? 😨

judge for yourself:
https://mutantleg.itch.io/zortch-2-test

this one is going to be quite a boring one - mostly text 🤔

there were several major bugs found during and after testing
one thing is sure: the fight against os problems and gpu driver shenanigans will never end 🤔

- one of the major new things I added to the engine is to make it run on two thread: one for update and one for rendering
but the game still stutters on some pretty powerful hardware - in the end no matter what you do this cannot be perfect
- because the window is using the render thread I attempted to use the windows function GetKeyboardState to read keyboard input
this randomly fails on some machines 🤔
there is fallback to use the regular keyboard input when it fails - so far nobody noticed a difference 🤔
- hiding the cursor is also hard - I had to use both WM_SETCURSOR and ShowCursor 🤔

there were several bugs that were caused by me and my poor coding though:
- you could fall through the floor by crouching in the wrong place
this was because I didn't use velocity to move the player when it gets into a crouch position
and it's important to move the position otherwise you hit your head in the wall during a quick slide
- not all guns were saved - I only saved the first 16 of the possible 32 slots - having defines for it didn't help
- grabbing onto ladders was broken when you looked up or down:
I didn't cancel out the y axis and  normalise the vectorused for checking
if you are facing the ladder
- I simply forgot to implement reaction time changes for higher difficulty making things too easy
- there were some race condition shenanigans with changing music 
music runs yet on other thread and even minimal race conditions cause trouble
the good thing about multi threaded coding is that it's difficult to debug and causes exotic bugs all over the place 

there were a few things that went well though
- now that I discovered dxt1 textures I use them everywhere
the lightmaps now use 4096x4096 resolution and still just use 16mb ram
(1 big lightmap for render (4096) and 1 smaller one (1024) for software lookup 12mb + 4mb)
- the menu navigation with gamepad works well - at least there were no complaints
the whole menu had to be rewritten - turns out an immediate gui doesn't do well with keyboard navigation
and turns out neither with gamepad one
- there were no major complaints about driving the forklift - but that may be  because many people dismissed it as decoration 🤔

overall it's nice that so many bugs got fixed long before release time
but I was surprised by how many were there 🤔

after a text heavy update here is an image heavy one

one thing I found out from this demo is that I need more mid bosses to place 🤔
of course people feel that the existing enemies are spongy enough already (have too much hp) 
so things are tricky 🤔

still, I feel a few more new faces might help things 🤔
(when in doubt just design more characters)

here is a redesign of the berserker enemy - I figured the weapon could be added later - perhaps there could be variants wielding different things?
so they meant to be elite soldiers - that are not just glass cannons but true cannons

this amusing figure is the sick-o-phant
and just a regular tank - an elephant like thing that sneezes at you 
(because he is sick and an elephant 👀 )

I have no idea how this guy will attack I just had the design in my head and had to do it 🤔 

another variant of the head bomb enemies - the baseball players meant to bat their heads at you
but their design is still in progress  - this time the idea is down but adjusting the character to it is the challenge 🤔

these propeller headed ones are not just difficult to model but will be also difficult to code - 
they meant to fly, walk and use their propeller to blow you away and/or potentially slice you up 🤔

and even I have no idea what this thing is supposed to be 🤔 

see you next time! 👋

just a short update - i'm busy making characters
and as you might know itch.io got a lot busy lately
due to unfortunate events  🤔
it's kind of nice to see some activity around here but
I wish it had happened in some other way 🤔

but I digress, once again I updated the demo (build 2072)
https://mutantleg.itch.io/zortch-2-test
this has fixes for the map that make the zoom better
and various small bugfixes
once again I'd like to thank everyone who reported them 👍

and here is the latest devlog stuff:

my new lightmap fixes are giving me a lot of trouble when it comes to making ambient lights
on the other hand it did wonders for the lowpoly model
this previously made train model now looks decent thanks for the lighting
the fixes for the normal calculation brings out it's shape much better

I made new textures for box cars and also made a new model for the wheels
they are also now placed in the correct position at the sides of the box

here is an attempt at a passenger car - strangely enough real railroad cars are twice as long as these
but at that size they feel too long - it's hard to get scale in a game to feel right - realistic measurements often don't feel realistic 🤔
irl a passenger car this size was only found in britain in the early days of trains and was considered the smallest 🤔

overall I have much more luck with characters - I decided to split the baseball player into two creatures

and the design of this propeller headed gal was finalized too - coding her will be a bit more difficult though 🤔

and finally a sum up of all the characters so far
there is also one for Zortch1: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3540307407

turns out I've been a lot busier than I thought 🤔
if only I had the same luck making levels 😓

oh well..

see you next time! 👋

I feel tired lately and sometimes making a devlog is just too tiring 🤔

but at least most of the tiredness is coming from making the game 🤔
let me show you what have I been up to:

The ruins area is slowly shaping up - I made a new new textures and came up with these mummies

here we see a former emperor who is grumpy for being awakened so early

overall most of the crowd around doesn't take well to your presence

probably the most cliche looking mummy ever - I kind of feel bad about it 🤔

I also managed to finish up the sphinx model 
rumor has it that originally it was a giant locust that was reshaped to be a wasp 👀

here is the low poly version in the editor - with additional statues

of course these are supposed to be ruins so I made a few broken versions of the statues

and for last here is an amusing wallpaper thing
I swear that kid always gets in trouble somehow 🤔

see you next time! 👋

and we are at 3 weeks since the last update
I mostly spent the time tightening up stuff

so I figured I should replace the old shotgun sound and this led to a bunch of other changes
and I remodelled some of the guns

now the rocket launcher feels like it got a hd udpdate - yet its the same high res model 🤔

also I did some optimising this time by only baking and modelling the visible parts 
turns out being lazy and optimising goes hand in hand  👀

the shotgun looks much more neat now

and the machine gun now looks like it means business  🤔

on problem with baking these characters is the lighting
I lost count how many times I rebaked this gal
problem with monochrome is they look very flat from far
this is a problem if you want players to notice them easily  
up close is fine but turns out you only see them up close very rarely
as these gals are always on the move 🤔

the solution was to go for the old trick  or orange-blue  lightning  - this really brings out the shapes of black stuff
and this was inspired by checking how people light up their alien toys - which being full black usually have the same problem 🤔

now I have to rebake all characters though
this new wall head was remodelled recently
and already in for a rebake

I'm being more lazy with lava and other damaging floors
but they still give me a lot of work 
for these mouths I had to write a tool from scratch to generate the animated texture 👀

and finally here is a puzzle that got cut from zortch 1 involving getting large balls to a goal
so far I got one area where I want to use them - and that is why they look like giant billiard balls 🤔

until next time! 👋