Author Archives: Binarin

Hello people! Binarin here.

It seems Joxe is changing a lot in the network code (since we can’t play multiplayer right now). Joxe has also been sick for two days now. But I don’t wanna mess with his code so I’ve been working on the planets, as mentioned in my last post :3.

Joxe’s spot hasn’t been empty tho. Our sound guy, Johan, has been here. He’s making some sweet sounds for us. However, the sounds won’t be perfect until we get Unity Pro because Johan want to add low pass filters. Low pass filters will make the sounds sound good at a long distant, so you can hear it’s far away and not just decreased volume.

Speaking about Unity Pro, we need it for several features:

• Low pass filter, as I just said.
• Shader refractions. Crylar says he can make some really cool effects if he has those. Try search for “shader refractions” to see just how awesome it looks.
• IK animations. So the mechs can aim their weapon when firing, and rest their feets on the planets as they stand or run.
• Support for dll librarys. We need this to have weapons written in Lua so the players can make their own weapons :D. Right now we’re using a C# library that is very buggy, and many weapons are written directly in C# instead.
• Importing assets in run time. This is something we most probably need to let players make assets for their weapons.

We’re currently looking into buying it, Mowhammer is on the job!

Like I said, I’ve been working on the non-round planets and they seem to be working now. The shape is made out of an array of Vector2, which can be edited from the inspector or can be imported from a mesh which was much easier to make than I thought. These planets also have a array of floats that states how long each position has to the first position in distance along the edges. This makes it much easier to quickly find where the player lands when it collides with the planet.

Oh, and by the way. Can you see that the trails after the mech goes too low when it lands? That it looks very uneven? This is because Unity calls my OnTriggerEnter function one frame too late. If I look at it frame by frame I can see how it moves into the planet without getting a call and on the frame afterwards it is pushed up to stand on the surface. When I Google for it I find that this was a bug that was reported in February 2012. I guess they’re not planing to fix it for a while. Crylar has been complaining at me over this because it is more visible on these planets. If you have good eyes you can actually notice that something jerks as you land. Hmm, the work around to fix this might be tiresome…

Thanks for reading and stay hyped!
@CyberBinarin

Hello people! Binarin here.

This is the first development post from Night Node. They will be written by the programmers and they cover more technical things, like what we’re working with now and what problems we have.

While Joxe is making cool stuff in the backend, that I don’t dare touch, I can look at adding new things to the game. That is, as long as Crylar won’t bug me about adding his particles.

So I’m currently looking into how we can make our “planets” more unique. I’m using the functionality I added a while ago, that let’s planets override things like how the player moves and the normals of the surface. The aim is to have planets that can have any shape! Or at least planets that are not completely round, coz’ that would be boring. To try this out I’ve made a planet out of a cube.

After a bit of fiddling I got it to work. However, it looks silly as the player moves around a corner because there is no transition of any kind. I will probably make the player airborne as he walks over corners.

I’ve also tried making a planet that takes it’s shape out of it’s mesh. This turned out to be tricky, even if I managed to make a algorithm for making a 2D shape out of the mesh, I would have to save it somewhere. I could probably put the code in a custom unity editor to make sure it was only generated in edit mode, and store it in the planets serialization. But instead I think I’ll just take a array of Vector2s from the editor, that way we can customize the shape more freely without worrying about the mesh, and I don’t have to that 2D shape convertion… Like, where would I start? find the face to the left and follow it clockwise and save every edge? … No.

Joxe will probably write his own post from home some time this week. But he has done some nice work with Unity’s network library. We can almost play multiplayer without crashes again ~woohoo.

If you have any questions or just wanna talk, you can contact me on anton@nightnode.se. Have fun and keep hyping!

@CyberBinarin