Oh, you're still reading along?!

Heyoo! This week sure has been interesting. From unexpected ragdoll issues to everything breaking and compilation errors it's sure been a time. But hey, at least we're now best buds with the Unity VFX Graph! Total win, am I right? :)

Art!!!

on the art side we've mostly been figuring out animations for our little carrot friend, doing some fx on the side and starting to replace blockout geometry with properly optimized models. Nothing is textured yet so you're gonna have to wait a little bit for some pretty visuals.

We have a bomb particle that scales with time, so you can tell when your time is starting to come to an end and you should really punch someone in the face!

He's ALLIIIIIVEEE!!!

This week with the character model available I was able to begin work on creating the ragdoll! Now this task is something that would soak up a lot of time, not because its a hard concept but because its a lot and I mean A LOT of manually setting things up. When I got the model it had the visual meshes and a rig, the rig are basically its bones. So I went to town and gave the rig rigidbodies, colliders and configurable joints. From the research we learned we can make the character stand up by simple upping the Angular drive. Now that I have this all set up I can begin on setting constrains on the joints, this limits the movements it can make just like your joints do. Again this is all not super interesting or hard to do it just takes up so much time! BUT your time can be well spent once you see the results. I made a quick testing script to simulate a punch and the results did not disappoint me. Its also important to have a working way of transitioning between stunned and unstunned, we do this by simply making a script that has 2 functions to disable and enable the drive. 

Now that We have a ragdoll its time to begin changing or functionality. We have been making scripts on little beans but obviously those scripts will not translate well once placed on our superior CarrotBoy.

He's Not Alive ????

This week the carrot character was introduced to the game. The test character we had before (BeanBoy) had given us a basic template to set a foundation for all the necessary code. So we went to apply that code to the new character thinking some differences will have tp be made to make it work as intended, oh boy did we underestimate that. Getting the character to move was a problem we solved slowly by realizing that the character's root is not moving with the ragdoll model. Since all of our movement was based on a root object moving around we had to change that so we would use the characters ragdoll model and leave the root at it's spawn point. After that the character had a whole new way of rotating that was handled by the ragdoll which we had not foreseen to be as different as it was. After some quaternion math we got that working in the end. Lastly the sphere cast to determine whether the character was standing on a surface was acting as if it was constantly on a surface... even when jumping which lead to a weird gravitational effect (floating downwards) and the character being able to jump on thin air. This problem however was a mystery to us. We still have no clue why the sphere cast does what it does. seemingly nothing is interfering with it so it's a pain to find out what's going wrong. Long story short we spent WAY too many hours trying to come with fixes to get the character moving again. Punching gave us an issue too, the hitbox for the punch doesn't want to trigger with anything it touches. The bean can trigger on a carrot but the carrot can't trigger on anything. This problem is another one we have no idea as to why this is happening only to the carrot. This week was a whole lot of trouble and not many solutions...