Animating with spreadsheets
Black Feathers in the Sky by MkVaff
Remix of Chapter 6: Dark Pit from Kid Icarus: Uprising
Hi all. My family's get-together for this month was for my eldest and youngest sisters' birthdays. The nephew is already toddling around with more speed and surety than last month. Also, the kiddies were on the tail end of a cold and passed it along to several of us, including me. Fortunately my work that week turned out to be light enough that taking a few days off didn't disrupt anything much.
In Forgotten Gates development, I was able to get the custom dungeon layout I mentioned last month working fairly early in this month. Unfortunately, my hypothesis about the occasional crash being related to rooms on the edge of the map turned out to be incorrect, so I still don't know what's causing it. e.e
Anyway, I switched back to working on Xu's abilities. I had to add to the code a capability for skills to have repeated effects for a single use, because a few of Xu's Song spells work that way. That was a little complicated, but not as bad as I feared it might turn out to be. That aside, it's been mostly animation work. I've gotten through all of Xu's regular skills and the spells for 3/6 of the Songs.
For one of the spells in the third Song, I decided I wanted a fancy startup animation wherein three fireballs whirl in a circle while rising above Xu's head. Of course, circular motions, especially with an added overall movement, are not something the RT2K3 animation editor is designed to do easily. So I whipped up a spreadsheet to calculate the positions the sprites should be in each frame. Of course, placing three sprites in pixel-exact spots, frame by frame, was tedious work.
So I decided to bite the bullet and do something I'd considered before but didn't want to spend the time for: updating the DynDatabaseOverride plugin to be able to import animations data. That way, I could use the numbers from my spreadsheet without having to translate it into the animation by hand. The update took about a week, with probably more than half of that being just updating the documentation and demo project so that other people can make use of it. X) Here are a couple of sample animations I came up with:
We got through a round of poses in the Lake Hylia scene on Zelda RPG toward the end of the month. The Zora, including Link-in-Zora-form, are continuing to try and deal with the Malice-infected whale. Ruto spotted Aubrey watching from the island and asked him if he could keep an eye on any injured they have, which of course Aubrey is glad to do. Irina tried to freeze some ice blocks onto the whale's fins and tail with her water magic, then went to the surface for a breath, which allowed Aubrey to notice her presence in the situation.
Factorio:
This is another game my brother got for me so we could play it together. It's conceptually very similar to Satisfactory, but in 2D. You're crashlanded on an alien world with no civilization, and you must build up an infrastructure that will allow you to make a rocket ship and escape. Little problem, though: while there's no civilization, there is wildlife, in the form of giant bugs. 8{ At first the bugs pay you no heed as long as you don't wander near their hives, but as you build more and more factories, you start polluting the vicinity, which drives the bugs to swarm in and destroy the things making all the smog.
The biggest difference from Satisfactory, apart from being 2D, is that you have to defend your base. While monsters in Satisfactory just exist until you come near, monsters in Factorio spawn new groups and eventually send clumps of bugs to attack. Still, it's not all that complicated, which is good for me since real-time strategy is one of my worst genres. X) Mainly you just need to make sure to build walls around your base, place turrets behind the walls, and supply them with a flow of ammunition. The types of defenses expand a bit as you unlock new tech and the bugs get bigger and nastier, but the basic strategy remains the same: build enough boom-boom to wipe out the waves before they can do serious damage, and you can mostly ignore them as they crash against your fortress while you keep working on your factories.
A more subtle difference is that the resources are located in bigger but more rare clumps than in Satisfactory. This means that instead of figuring out what products you can make with the resources in a particular area, you tend to funnel ALL your basic resources into a big pipeline of conveyor belts, then build factories alongside that main bus which siphon resources from it to build whatever you need. It's a more slapdash approach that doesn't reward precision efficiency as much.
One more big difference that doesn't get unlocked until midway through the tech tree is automation of building. You can eventually build robots that can not only move resources for you, but actually build structures and maintain them when they get damaged or destroyed by the bugs. THAT opens up a lot more efficiency, especially if you become proficient with designing blueprints. You can lay out a modular set of buildings, complete with the infrastructure needed between them like conveyor belts, power lines, etc., then copy it and instruct your robots to place a whole bunch of that design. It takes a lot of the grunt-work out of building large-scale factories.
Bottom line? Loads of fun for those who love base-building and engineering, although personally I preferred Satisfactory for that purpose on the whole.
Psychonauts 2:
The release of this game kinda slipped by me -- I was like, "I wonder when Psychonauts 2 will come out -- oh hey, it's been out for a while now." c.c And even after that I didn't get around to acquiring it until it was given to me on my last birthday a couple months ago.
So what's to be said about it? As a sequel, it's pretty much what you'd expect. It has essentially the same gameplay as the first, with of course a few new abilities, enemies, etc. thrown in. It continues the story from before (including the events of a non-numbered midquel on VR called Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, I'll have to play that too eventually when I have the hardware for it). It has the same quirky humor, explore-the-bizarre-mindscapes-of-various-people premise, and outlandish art style, though of course it takes advantage of the advances in graphical performance. It's more-of-the-same-and-then-some-and-better, which is typically exactly what you want in a sequel -- it just doesn't make for much of a review. X)
I will give a few highlights and gripes. The figments (coin-like collectibles) are easier to spot, and they're less likely to wander on a circuit that makes them possible to miss. The stages, as always, are very creative and interesting to explore, and they're generally a solid 3D platforming experience too. Story-wise, there's a concern throughout that there's a MOLE in the Psychonauts, and you meet a number of characters who feel like they believably could or could not be the traitor. :o I had it sort of half figured-out by the reveal, with the other half being something I couldn't reasonably have guessed -- not a bad way for a mystery story to unfold.
On the negative end, there are still a few collectibles that are ridiculously well-hidden. There are some side-quests that require you to find a particular starting point in the large hub world, and if you don't come across them early, you'll have to re-explore hard-to-reach nooks. Combat can be a little chaotic, with some enemies making very sudden attacks that have to be anticipated and dodged, and sometimes there's lots of them at the same time -- fortunately the amount of health you should have by that point is pretty generous. And on a non-gameplay note, they included some woke propaganda in the form of two characters of medium importance being a homosexual couple. e.e It's not particularly important to the story, although they'd have had to come up with a different theme for one of the areas without it (or they could've just made one of the characters involved female).
Bottom line? Not perfect, but pretty good quality on the whole, and definitely worthwhile if you liked the first game.
Remix of Chapter 6: Dark Pit from Kid Icarus: Uprising
Click to viewHi all. My family's get-together for this month was for my eldest and youngest sisters' birthdays. The nephew is already toddling around with more speed and surety than last month. Also, the kiddies were on the tail end of a cold and passed it along to several of us, including me. Fortunately my work that week turned out to be light enough that taking a few days off didn't disrupt anything much.
In Forgotten Gates development, I was able to get the custom dungeon layout I mentioned last month working fairly early in this month. Unfortunately, my hypothesis about the occasional crash being related to rooms on the edge of the map turned out to be incorrect, so I still don't know what's causing it. e.e
Anyway, I switched back to working on Xu's abilities. I had to add to the code a capability for skills to have repeated effects for a single use, because a few of Xu's Song spells work that way. That was a little complicated, but not as bad as I feared it might turn out to be. That aside, it's been mostly animation work. I've gotten through all of Xu's regular skills and the spells for 3/6 of the Songs.
For one of the spells in the third Song, I decided I wanted a fancy startup animation wherein three fireballs whirl in a circle while rising above Xu's head. Of course, circular motions, especially with an added overall movement, are not something the RT2K3 animation editor is designed to do easily. So I whipped up a spreadsheet to calculate the positions the sprites should be in each frame. Of course, placing three sprites in pixel-exact spots, frame by frame, was tedious work.
So I decided to bite the bullet and do something I'd considered before but didn't want to spend the time for: updating the DynDatabaseOverride plugin to be able to import animations data. That way, I could use the numbers from my spreadsheet without having to translate it into the animation by hand. The update took about a week, with probably more than half of that being just updating the documentation and demo project so that other people can make use of it. X) Here are a couple of sample animations I came up with:
We got through a round of poses in the Lake Hylia scene on Zelda RPG toward the end of the month. The Zora, including Link-in-Zora-form, are continuing to try and deal with the Malice-infected whale. Ruto spotted Aubrey watching from the island and asked him if he could keep an eye on any injured they have, which of course Aubrey is glad to do. Irina tried to freeze some ice blocks onto the whale's fins and tail with her water magic, then went to the surface for a breath, which allowed Aubrey to notice her presence in the situation.
Factorio:
This is another game my brother got for me so we could play it together. It's conceptually very similar to Satisfactory, but in 2D. You're crashlanded on an alien world with no civilization, and you must build up an infrastructure that will allow you to make a rocket ship and escape. Little problem, though: while there's no civilization, there is wildlife, in the form of giant bugs. 8{ At first the bugs pay you no heed as long as you don't wander near their hives, but as you build more and more factories, you start polluting the vicinity, which drives the bugs to swarm in and destroy the things making all the smog.
The biggest difference from Satisfactory, apart from being 2D, is that you have to defend your base. While monsters in Satisfactory just exist until you come near, monsters in Factorio spawn new groups and eventually send clumps of bugs to attack. Still, it's not all that complicated, which is good for me since real-time strategy is one of my worst genres. X) Mainly you just need to make sure to build walls around your base, place turrets behind the walls, and supply them with a flow of ammunition. The types of defenses expand a bit as you unlock new tech and the bugs get bigger and nastier, but the basic strategy remains the same: build enough boom-boom to wipe out the waves before they can do serious damage, and you can mostly ignore them as they crash against your fortress while you keep working on your factories.
A more subtle difference is that the resources are located in bigger but more rare clumps than in Satisfactory. This means that instead of figuring out what products you can make with the resources in a particular area, you tend to funnel ALL your basic resources into a big pipeline of conveyor belts, then build factories alongside that main bus which siphon resources from it to build whatever you need. It's a more slapdash approach that doesn't reward precision efficiency as much.
One more big difference that doesn't get unlocked until midway through the tech tree is automation of building. You can eventually build robots that can not only move resources for you, but actually build structures and maintain them when they get damaged or destroyed by the bugs. THAT opens up a lot more efficiency, especially if you become proficient with designing blueprints. You can lay out a modular set of buildings, complete with the infrastructure needed between them like conveyor belts, power lines, etc., then copy it and instruct your robots to place a whole bunch of that design. It takes a lot of the grunt-work out of building large-scale factories.
Bottom line? Loads of fun for those who love base-building and engineering, although personally I preferred Satisfactory for that purpose on the whole.
Psychonauts 2:
The release of this game kinda slipped by me -- I was like, "I wonder when Psychonauts 2 will come out -- oh hey, it's been out for a while now." c.c And even after that I didn't get around to acquiring it until it was given to me on my last birthday a couple months ago.
So what's to be said about it? As a sequel, it's pretty much what you'd expect. It has essentially the same gameplay as the first, with of course a few new abilities, enemies, etc. thrown in. It continues the story from before (including the events of a non-numbered midquel on VR called Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, I'll have to play that too eventually when I have the hardware for it). It has the same quirky humor, explore-the-bizarre-mindscapes-of-various-people premise, and outlandish art style, though of course it takes advantage of the advances in graphical performance. It's more-of-the-same-and-then-some-and-better, which is typically exactly what you want in a sequel -- it just doesn't make for much of a review. X)
I will give a few highlights and gripes. The figments (coin-like collectibles) are easier to spot, and they're less likely to wander on a circuit that makes them possible to miss. The stages, as always, are very creative and interesting to explore, and they're generally a solid 3D platforming experience too. Story-wise, there's a concern throughout that there's a MOLE in the Psychonauts, and you meet a number of characters who feel like they believably could or could not be the traitor. :o I had it sort of half figured-out by the reveal, with the other half being something I couldn't reasonably have guessed -- not a bad way for a mystery story to unfold.
On the negative end, there are still a few collectibles that are ridiculously well-hidden. There are some side-quests that require you to find a particular starting point in the large hub world, and if you don't come across them early, you'll have to re-explore hard-to-reach nooks. Combat can be a little chaotic, with some enemies making very sudden attacks that have to be anticipated and dodged, and sometimes there's lots of them at the same time -- fortunately the amount of health you should have by that point is pretty generous. And on a non-gameplay note, they included some woke propaganda in the form of two characters of medium importance being a homosexual couple. e.e It's not particularly important to the story, although they'd have had to come up with a different theme for one of the areas without it (or they could've just made one of the characters involved female).
Bottom line? Not perfect, but pretty good quality on the whole, and definitely worthwhile if you liked the first game.