Dev Blog 34 - No Way Amogus

Howdy! It’s quite late, and I’m quite tired, but I feel an odd sort of energy taking over me. If you’ll recall correctly, I talked about how I’ve been doing some Super Smash Bros. Melee modding in my free time. Well…

geez, that's a lot...

…”some” might be an understatement. It’s basically all I do outside of Rolled Out! work, now. These are all individual animations I’ve completed for a custom character I’m working on. Character animation is a lot of fun!!!

Maybe, after Rolled Out! is done, we’ll make a platform fighter. That’ll be the day…

Anyways, let’s jump into the update.

The main reason that this update was late, is because we were working on wrapping up the implementation for a few new systems! Let’s run through the two most notable ones.

We now support conveyer belts that are directed along the UV mapping of the surface. Essentially, this just means that conveyer belts can curve in any which direction the level designer wants. (This was not possible before… a conveyer belt could only push the ball in one direction.)

However, worth noting… that effect with the texture scrolling along in the direction of the conveyer belt is NOT a consequence OF the conveyer belt. That’s an entirely separate matter… we recently revamped our material system a little bit, to allow for any vector or scalar property to be animated. CraftedCart has a little writeup about it to share with you, in fact! Take it away.


I feel Powerful

I didn’t really have much of interest to say for the last few weeks, mostly boring backend stuff and bashing my head against a wall and getting nowhere >.<. This time though, hooh I have something fancy looking.

So, while we had conveyor surfaces in the game, we didn’t really have a way to convey (ha ha) to the player whether a surface was a conveyor or not, such as by having the texture scroll. The way I saw it, there were two ways we could handle this: we could add a simple X/Y scroll speed option to materials, oooor I could go and wire up our animation system to materials. …yeah I went with the latter. :)

And so now, every material property that could could manipulate for custom stages, can now also be hooked up to animation curves (excluding textures… you can’t exactly animate a texture with a curve). Want to animate texture scroll? You’ll want an animation that uses the path parameter_overrides.vector2.tex_coord_offset.x (or .y). Opacity? No problem, as long as you’re using a translucent material. Refraction? You can make some trippy looking things with that. :3

(Can you tell I’m having perhaps a bit too much fun with material animations?)

Anywyas, we’ll have technical docs for all the properties you can use and how you can animate them, I promise, so those of you who may like making custom level can muck around with this.


NO WAY

See you all in March.