Heya everyone! This was a great week for Super Hero Life IV.
This was a week focused on the LP3 (low-poly 3 - as it is our third attempt to make a nice low-poly bodytype) and making it look better than ever!
Building the LP3 Character with Rigged Customization Assets (Finally!!!)
The effort began by making a character spawn out of multiple different imported meshes, having them use a pre-standardized rig for the animations to play off of. This included a ton of stuff on the backend, with the focus being on making it as scaleable as possible.
One thing we did which I’m very excited about is setting up a system to auto-implement new suits we import, meaning when we import a suit in as meshparts all we have to do is drop it into a folder and it will be ready to use! In the past, we had to spend ~30 mins integrating the look into various scripts, as well as grouping and organizing and renaming a bunch of parts in the outfit. This made adding new things tedious. With this new system, it will be a lot easier to add new suits!
From there we started importing new suits to the game. The first major one was called “Leather Armor” and it was inspired by medieval armor popularized by the fantasy genre. As so many superheroes have ancient backgrounds, we felt having more historically inspired outfits would be a great way to bring variety to the editor. Around this time we also implemented the texturing system, allowing us to easily color and texture (stay tuned for various PBR custom textures in the coming weeks!) each individual asset by texture group. This means that we can easily have as many different colors on an asset as we want - say goodbye to “Primary”, “Secondary”, and “Tertiary/Base”! This technology was first implemented on Nightships where it received praise by testers.
This all came together for us to release a 22 second video showing off all the new suit system could do! Using just 3 imported suits, we were able to create a bunch of amazing looks by mixing and matching parts! We walked around the city in them set to some of the official Roblox licensed monstercat music. Definitely give it a watch!
Organizing the LP3
Along with all the impressive visual additions, we made adjustments to the structure on the backend. This image isn’t high res enough to really appreciate the details, but it breaks down into 4 major systems, one for customization, one for taking player input and effecting the avatar with it, one is for helping the game determine avatar states, and one is for sending the relevant data to the server for multiplayer replication!
Inverse Kinematics
Last week we hoped to begin work on Inverse Kinematics (moving jointed limbs to try to reach a certain position), and we did! Unfortunately, it has taken much longer than expected, and we’ve changed implementation strategies multiple times. As of writing this we are able to get a joint to ignore the playing animation and orient towards the goal position, however we haven’t been able to implement constraints to prevent things like the limb going through the body, or twisting in a visually painful manner.
These are just temporary setbacks, and the effort will be well worth it. The goal though at the end of 0.1.0 is for the LP3 to be able to:
- Turn head and shoulders toward camera focus
- Raise and lower legs to when going up hills
- Avoid wall clipping whenever possible
- Capes and long hair that respond to player movement
And if we get this working it unlocks many other possibilities:
- Actually having the character reach out and interact with items when picking them up, rather than having them just teleport to your hand
- Realistic Joint Constrained Ragdolling
- VR Porting
This Week
This week we’re feeling ambitious, by next Monday we’re hoping that:
- We’ll have completed Inverse Kinematics Integration
- Rigged avatar faces with multiple different recolorable eye types
- Rigged movement responsive capes
- Rigged movement responsive hair
- We’ll have added a new 3D modeling developer to the team to help Ryferion1 pump out awesome assets!
Current Estimated 0.1.0 Earliest Testing Release Date
Our last week’s update was 10/7/20, however, due to inverse-kinematics taking so long that release date has moved up to 10/12/20. This could very well change, getting closer or farther away. It will come out when it’s ready, and at the moment we think we need until October 12th. If you wish to test the game you need to join the official discord, which can be found attached in the social links of all our major games. If you want to wait until paid-access though, our current hope is to reach that stage by December!