Funny dev conversation.

[x4000]

Keith: I hope the raptor project's being entertaining work.

Me: It has been, although tough as well in some respects.  Getting the raptor himself to behave the way I want has been a lot harder than I expected, because I'm having to use so many different systems all at once blended together.  A lot of that was just a learning process on my part, though, and I've got it figured out finally and have him working the way I want.  Developing out a character controller that is complex enough to feel organic and like you actually ARE a raptor is the core selling point of this game for me, so it definitely wasn't wasted time, but it was super frustrating.   Getting a camera set up that works properly for all the use cases in question was also a nightmare, and I learned a lot there, too.

Those two things were bits that really don't apply to the survival game (although it will help with enemies later, and also is just good knowledge to have for future games I might do), but thankfully now I'm back into territory that is more familiar to me from February.

Keith:

Getting the raptor himself to behave the way I want has been a lot harder than I expected.

That's an epitaph if I ever heard one

[Draco18s]

Hehe

Glad you got all the bits cooperating properly.  I kind of figured that input control for something like this would be a nightmare.

[x4000]

The original input control was something that I had going pretty fast, honestly.  But making everything feel GOOD was another matter.  That, plus dealing with things like hitboxes for a very non-humanoid character, which is pretty uncommon.  Using some IK and some ragdoll physics in combination with traditional animations let me work around the clipping issues, but even there I had to do some tricky things with hitboxes that are only sometimes active, etc, to keep things from getting nutty in some jump cases, etc.

It works out well, and for a character controller of this sort it's actually not so complex in the end.  But I must have tried like 40 wrong approaches that I wasn't happy with before getting a compound one that I do like.

[Misery]

Good grief all this stuff you're doing to make this sounds very... complicated.

As always I dont know how the heck you do it.  But it's good to hear it's coming along nicely.

[x4000]

It's a new level of complexity in terms of individual character creation, but at the same time it's all very... encapsulated.  You know how The Warden is bloody complicated how you created him?  But you could work on one pattern of him at a time, one difficulty level, one stage, etc?  It's that kind of complexity.  It's nice, because that doesn't bleed over into any other part of the game... and you can also always go back and make that complex thing even MORE complex if you want to, like you did with The Warden.

[Pumpkin]

Getting the raptor himself to behave the way I want has been a lot harder than I expected.

That's an epitaph if I ever heard one

I would love to see that kind of silly-funny epitaph ingame. If there is some kind of respawn mechanism, would you consider marking a death place with gravestone and a randomly picked message from a community-made list?

I'm sure we can come up with some funny things, as we did for SBR, but this one ("getting the raptor to behave the way I want") is really entertaining. But as the player is the raptor, maybe it would make more sense on a player's casualty's grave.

Ideas in the wind.

[steelwing]

Getting the raptor himself to behave the way I want has been a lot harder than I expected.

That's an epitaph if I ever heard one

I would love to see that kind of silly-funny epitaph ingame. If there is some kind of respawn mechanism, would you consider marking a death place with gravestone and a randomly picked message from a community-made list?

I'm sure we can come up with some funny things, as we did for SBR, but this one ("getting the raptor to behave the way I want") is really entertaining. But as the player is the raptor, maybe it would make more sense on a player's casualty's grave.

Ideas in the wind.

"Here lies Pumpkin, who could not get the raptor to behave the way he wanted."

[keith.lamothe]

"Here lies Pumpkin, who could not get the raptor to behave the way he wanted."

Rule #1 of Raptor Training: the Treat must be Tastier than the Trainer.

[Pumpkin]

"Here lies XXX, who could not recognize a case of emergency."

[Cinth]

The tombstones from AVVW were pretty funny.

[Aklyon]

They were.