Barricade (1)
All right. I played the game a bit to see what it's like and been having fun with the aliens' wall climbing ability. Ended up being dizzy and disoriented :P
I did some initial quick concepts and picked one to develop -
Your thoughts please. Is it good, or Completely off?
Cheers and happy Pesach :)
Hey, nice sketch! I like it style-wise but from a gameplay perspective, I'm not sure if we want to move away from a square footprint. I personally have no objections (I find the limitations of our current barricades somewhat silly), but we should discuss this here before you move on with such a layout. Currently there is also a technical limitation: Our bounding boxes don't rotate, so they should have equal width and length. I've heard numerous times that we want to move away from bounding boxes towards polygon based hit detection but I don't think this is decided upon yet.
Let's assume we want the barricade to be wider than our current placeholder and we will be moving to polygon based hit detection to make this possible. Then the only thing I'd change is to close the hole above the barricades head, so you can't shoot through. Also the wings had to reach to the bottom so you can't roll grenades below them. I can imagine a nice shrinking animation where the wings are lowered towards the side. :)
Responsible for: Arch Linux package & torrent distribution, Parpax (map), Chameleon (map texture editor), Sloth (material file generator), gameplay design & programming, artistic direction
All right, I understand. Glad you like the sketch :)
So then, I need to consider the idea of the barricade fitting within a squarish restriction because as now it can't be a rectangular area.
I'd like a word of advice of how to proceed with it - I can develop further the concept I did and ignore the current restrictions, hoping for the best. Or perhaps I can restrict myself to the square and build a concept within those limits.
Thoughts on this ?
Looks good!
Viech wrote:Hey, nice sketch! I like it style-wise but from a gameplay perspective, I'm not sure if we want to move away from a square footprint. I personally have no objections (I find the limitations of our current barricades somewhat silly), but we should discuss this here before you move on with such a layout. Currently there is also a technical limitation: Our bounding boxes don't rotate, so they should have equal width and length. I've heard numerous times that we want to move away from bounding boxes towards polygon based hit detection but I don't think this is decided upon yet.
Oh, whoops, I suppose I should have made it more clear that I had asked Case if he could experiment with concepts for different styles of barricades despite the limitation.
As for polygonal hit detection (commonly referred to as "collision hulls"), I think before we even go there it would be a quantum leap if we went from AABBs (axially-aligned bounding boxes) to arbitrary-orientation bounding boxes. (Even if they could just be yawed around the vertical axis that would be all we would need).
As for how we might implement a barricade that expands to fit a doorway, we'd define the maximum area that it could expand to fill, write some code to detect doorway edges, I suppose, and implement bone scaling (IQM, anyone?) and stretch the wing bones to reach. (The tips of the wing bones would have to correspond with the edges of the wing geometry so we could cheat and just manipulate the end of the bones without any additional math.)
@Case: tl;dr, don't worry about it. I'll badger the others to more seriously consider better collision detection and what else we would need to make this happen. If you would like to try some square-based concepts, however, I have to say I like the nice, kinda tentacle-y base that you've drawn and I think that could suit other buildables if need be.
Viech wrote:Then the only thing I'd change is to close the hole above the barricades head, so you can't shoot through. Also the wings had to reach to the bottom so you can't roll grenades below them. I can imagine a nice shrinking animation where the wings are lowered towards the side. :)
I like the webbing between the wings, so (imo) filling that curvature in would just take away from the concept, I think, but this is a valid concern. We could explain away not being able to shoot/throw grenades between the gaps by filling in that area with the same kind of web-like creep like what forms the base of the egg.
@Case, if you have other iterations in mind, go for it, if not you could try drawing concepts for the hive, which is a literally an alien-looking hive of insects that hunt down the player and do damage to them.
