Holiday Project

[Darth Yoshi]

What's the one with the bridges supposed to show? Is that impact or premature firing?

[Starglider]

What's the one with the bridges supposed to show? Is that impact or premature firing?

Premature firing; if you try and shoot rocks before they are fully summoned they just crumble into rubble. Admittedly that wasn't a very good screenshot. Impact looks like this;



I implemented the distortion wave effect that (seemingly) all late-2000s FPSes used to jazz up their explosions, but it doesn't really show in static screenshots. It makes a satisfying swoosh / boom / rumble noise.

[Starglider]

Added a pulsing swirling border effect for when your bird is taking damage, an important cue in first person view where you can't see the particle effects;



Also fixed a bug which prevented the 'Dragon's Breath' attack from lighting trees on fire, so using it while flying low through a forest is now similar to Russian roulette....

[Starglider]

Fixed various minor collision detection bugs that were glitching the meteor storm weapon. My aim is to make all the special attacks really satisfying to use, and the meteors definitely are fun once you have some practice, sort of a combination rocket launcher / shotgun.



Story art production continues, this is a magical superweapon going off;

[Starglider]

Implemented the ether flight ability, which is basically warp drive. This is another one that doesn't look good in stills, but works better when animated;



I'm cheating here, normally only the falcon character has it. Since you normally fight with between two and four of the characters and can switch between them at any time (the characters you aren't controlling fight defensively under AI control), I am trying to make each character's abilities appealing to different kinds of player. Since the falcon can get around the playfield very quickly and has an auto-targetting area attack with very generous lock-on (chain lightning), instant gratification biased players will probably like him. OTOH the falcon is hard to control, has low health and lacks a heavy damage attack.

[Darth Yoshi]

How does the character swapping work? I'm assuming that you'll never swap to find yourself flying into a mountain or anything like that.

[Starglider]

How does the character swapping work?

The D-pad : conveniently there are four characters and four directions on the D-pad.

I'm assuming that you'll never swap to find yourself flying into a mountain or anything like that.

No. AI controlled birds can't crash and can't die unless you switch away from them immediately before they get hit by a major attack. They circle around and take pot shots at the enemies with the default attack. They are a bit more useful than Ace Combat wingman though in that the AI will fly characters back to health/mana recharge structures for you, so with three or four characters present you don't have to do this yourself.

[Starglider]

Finnished implementing the worm enemies. This is just something intrinsically disgusting about their animation, both the squirming flight and the 'woodpecker' tree eating, which is good as it makes them more fun to exterminate.



A swarm like this will eat about a tree every second, fortunately when they're that close to the ground they're easy to kill with the seismic shockwaves from the meteor storm attack. Drawing aggro from that many makes for a pretty chaotic dogfight. I discovered an exploit in testing; usually this enemy is fairly resistant to crashing, but if you fly low and slow over the water while a group of these are chasing you, they will often lunge down at you, miss, and drown themselves. I've decided to leave that in as it's quite funny (reward player experimentation etc). It's also possible (although dangerous) to draw fire from the claw enemies, lead the fireballs towards the worms, dodge and let them explode the worms. Occasionally this happens without player intervention when the worms and the claws decide to target the same bit of woodland at the same time.

Unless you're playing on easy, it takes multiple hits with the default attack to kill these things, unless you charge your shots to max (on hard it takes two even then). To visually confirm to players that they're doing damage I added a brief electic sparkle effect (with crackling noise) to all enemies, when hit by ball lightning or chain lightning;



Also some more story art;

[Starglider]

Ground movement (and swimming) is the only bit of Windhaven that uses inverse kinematics; everything else is forward kinematics from simulated muscles and springs. For walking around I select a foot position for each step and use simple IK to generate the leg / foot joint angles. As usual I implemented the maths from first principles, the X360 version is far too CPU-marginal to mess about with heavyweight pre-made libraries. As it is all my key matrix ops are not just ref-based and (where applicable) hand-inlined, I also had to go through and manually remove a lot of known-to-be-zero terms.

Here is a raven running with wings half-open; takeoff distance from a standing start is about two metres.



I might do better grass and normal-mapped ground for the PC version later.

[Starglider]

New dev video with the meteor storm attack, ether flight ability, shadow worms, landings, takeoffs, smart motion blur etc;

[Darth Yoshi]

Ooh, looks nice. One thing, though. I see a flash every time you drop out of ether flight. What's that all about?

[salm]

Awesome. You can shoot off parts of the larger enemies. Does that have any effect besides a visual one? Can you shoot off their "engines" for example to slow them down?

The "bing" sound that announces the next ring to fly through is really annoying.

[Starglider]

Ooh, looks nice. One thing, though. I see a flash every time you drop out of ether flight. What's that all about?

It's a bug; the shader control data is corrupted when the dust mode switches. I'll fix it eventually.

Awesome. You can shoot off parts of the larger enemies. Does that have any effect besides a visual one? Can you shoot off their "engines" for example to slow them down?

Yes, if you shoot flippers off they slow down and go into a circle. If you shoot all the flippers off they go into a nose dive and eventually crash and explode. I didn't show that because it takes a while and the video was too long already.

The "bing" sound that announces the next ring to fly through is really annoying.

I made a new sound because the previous 'ping' was annoying (it's still present for the soaring challenge at the end of the video). If you have a better sound in mind please do suggest it.

[salm]

Since your game has this sort of "ethereal" feel to it i find a swoosh would be more fitting than a bing.
Something like in this video:

[Starglider]

Since your game has this sort of "ethereal" feel to it i find a swoosh would be more fitting than a bing.
Something like in this video:

Thanks, I'll try that and see what it sounds like in game.

Some more 2D art : this is getting more ACE COMBAT : GOOSE with every update...



"Shadowy monsters have driven us back to the island of North Point. Mobius Hawk, your mission is to..."
"the evil Eursian vultures have constructed this spikey metal thing which just has to be a superweapon, please blow it up for us..."

[Starglider]

Started adding the golden nest items to free flight mode :



There will be thirty or so of these to find and collect, which unlocks bonus content such as story art gallery, airship pilot mode, F/A-18 AGGRESOR etc. Like all other meshes this is generated procedurally, to be honest I suck at using 3D modelling programs so much that it seems easier for me to make up the splines and transforms for this kind of thing in my head than model and import it.

Also did some shader optimisation and got around to adding a shoreline waves effect;



Sadly I can't make it more elaborate than that and still maintain 60 FPS on the Xbox.

[Starglider]

Cheat sheet with all the golden nest locations on it (click for bigger) :

[Starglider]

Implemented the plasma bolt attack for the Nightmare Moons Stars;



These things have a discordant descending keen, strong persistent homing, blow trees into glowing shrapnel (on a direct hit, near miss just sets them on fire) and a bit of wraith hive ship in the fire and impact sounds, so flying though a bombardment is a little disconcerting. Should look better when dynamic lighting is working, currently it's implemented in the shaders but I haven't done the quadtree for resolving dynamic lights to sectors.

Also fixed the gib model, these things are hard to kill so I made it a little more satisfying;

[Starglider]

A flock of slicers about to catch and kill the swan;



These things are utterly vicious at the moment, I need to back off the AI on them a bit and give the player more opportunities to shoot them down (you can't normally reverse the camera like this in air combat missions).

[Starglider]

I originally specified the 'shockwave' special attack as a forcefield that could be used defensively or offensively, by launching it at the enemies. I implemented it as a Star Trek TNG bubble shield style effect, but that seemed a little boring and generic, so I changed it to this crystal egg effect.



When enemies hit the shield they shatter facets of it, which slowly regenerate. The whole thing can be shot forwards (minus the back part), where it expands and smashes dramatically into tumbling shards as it hits enemies or reaches the maximum range. This is functionally a little more interesting, because the shield has point damage instead of an overall energy level, and also more fun; smashing glass things is more fun than blowing bubbles. It also fits the earth-themed powers of the character better (actually the hawk; I just test with the swan a lot because I like swans).

[Starglider]

I decided to make the crystal egg a combined passive / active ability; it comes on in defensive mode just by switching to the attack, but you can still shoot it (or rather, the front half) at enemies if you want. This makes it easier to use; in the former design where you have to hold down the stick/shoulder button to charge it, then release to fire, it's too easy to shoot it off accidentally. That pattern works ok for the fireballs but the shield is something you want up for long periods - it's also the first special ability you get in story mode, so it needs to be easy to use. Here are the grow and shatter effects when you switch into and out of crystal egg mode.

[Starglider]

New development video available including crystal egg, nightmare stars, plasma bolts, shadow slicers, golden nests, music by Zack Parrish (who is now composing a score for the game), assorted engine tweaks and my personal favourite, force chain lightning;



When you absolutely positively have to kill every enemy on the screen, accept no substitutes.

[Darth Yoshi]

Oh, wow. Youtube is being pretty laggy for me right now, so I can't comment on the video, but the pics themselves look awesome.

[LaCroix]

I like the save icon - the birdcage is a great idea...

[Starglider]

First pass at the typhoon special attack. I may tweak this to look more realistic later, if I get time, but it's good enough to playtest. This attack persists on the level for about 20 seconds; it sucks in, traps and damages / kills enemies. It can suck your bird in as well, although it doesn't damage the player.