This week has been busy like usual. I mostly worked on the characters shader, the environment atmosphere and with most of the team to get the network working.
Shaders
All shaders have been modified to allow the blending of the diffuse and a flat color while retaining the ability to add 2 highlights sensitive colors inherited from the diffuse. Also, the main normal map can be (or not) used and have its power adjusted. It seems its going to take some time for my artist teammates to get used to the shader settings. I learned quickly that giving away a shader for practical use without any explanation about its features will make all time spent building it worthless. I didn't have time to build a water/snow/lava shader but it will be for much later out in the future because enough time has been spent on the shaders. I wasn't supposed to do that much.
Characters
Now that I had the textures, I could implement my character shader and tweak as desired. For now, there are only two colors presented but any color of the cloth, energy, skin, crystals and eyes can be adjusted freely. A lot of time was spent trying to solve a Z-Sorting issue with the crystals as well as making them not self-ilum when under shadows. Also, the programmers kept having uncompiled/pink shaders for the crystals and I found out that materials automatically created from material IDs are a pain to organize/modify/rename without forgetting a meta file here and there. You can't even paste a material from the assets on a multi-material, so you have to directly access the mesh asset to edit them. Unity really lacks freedom of choice when it comes to applying assets in the inspector.
Environment
I adjusted the fog falloff and density to have the far objects blend better with the background. I have seen a lot of games where far objects are of an opaque fog color over a pale blue background... which is totally unrealistic. An additional height fog was added on the lower layer of the level as well.
Network
Our target for this week was to have some basic mechanics implemented and demo them in class in multiplayer. I had to quickly redo the temporary particle effects that were not working anymore and work with the programmers to make them functional ASAP. We gathered almost everyone together before Monday to get the network working at our school for the weekly presentation. It took a while to find out how it all worked out but we all had smiles on our faces when we could finally shoot projectiles at each other and see primary game mechanics in action (although not quite perfect). We took the occasion to notice a lot of bugs regarding player movement and server response but nothing that really breaks the game. Obviously, there is still a lot to do...
To do...
--Animations: As the only animator on this team (my grades also depend on them), I will need to polish them as best I can.
--Particles: Long list... we need 4 direct attacks + 4 AoE attacks (w/impacts), dash FX and 4 special attacks. I'll probably not have time to make them all but at the very least, the data will be there for the programmers. We shared the pipeline and file naming conventions.
Till next week!
--Particles: Long list... we need 4 direct attacks + 4 AoE attacks (w/impacts), dash FX and 4 special attacks. I'll probably not have time to make them all but at the very least, the data will be there for the programmers. We shared the pipeline and file naming conventions.
Till next week!