SlingBots - Major Changes, and Audio Strangeness.

posted in Septopus for project Unsettled World
Published February 04, 2019
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Okay, it's been a busy couple of weeks, I've been playing with shaders and retouching meshes and all kinds of fun things. 

  • Aiming/Shot Camera is now right-click, it orients to your current facing/throwing direction, and changes if you do.  I've eliminated the reverse camera angle for now(former right-click), I might move it to another button.  I re-used the fixed angle reverse camera code, added an IF that swaps it from a rear facing camera to a front facing camera depending on direction of travel and there you have it, a camera that snaps to an angle of your shot/thrust direction on a mouse-click.  It's also excellent for surveying while airborne. 
  • I've re-instituted the single mesh collider for the terrain, so no more bumps on seams.  I may solve this some day.. not yet.. haha
  • UI clicks should no longer throw snowballs, so reloading fuel during a race is easily done, toggling the mini-map is easily done, and anything else involving the UI.
  • New(old) Toon shaders for almost all of the moving parts.  Going for super-simple and performant. 
  • I've touched every game object that has a texture at least once or twice in this last week(hopefully.. lol)..  I've been trying to optimize and simplify where possible, as well as make sure I'm only using the shaders I intend to.
  • I spent quite a bit of time revisiting lighting and setting up a super simple ultra-low definition baked lighting arrangement.
  • I created a new ground texture, and..  SNOW!!  haha, I've added a snow particle effect and hopefully it will play well for you, still tuning it though. :D

This is the third day in a row I've tried to upgrade the WebGL build to the latest version only to be confronted by various bugs and strange issues.  Now, most of those were of my own creation, naturally.  However I've stumbled on some strange behavior that I thought might be noteworthy for anybody else who is working with Audio in Unity for a WebAssembly (WebGL) build target.  Somewhat applicable outside Unity land though..

Somewhere between the last build and this build I updated Unity and it seems they changed the way that their WebAssembly build target interacts with audio files because my clumsy assortment of .mp3s and .wavs and .oggs worked just fine on both FireFox and Chrome previously. 

After updating to 2018.3, or some assortment of changes I made to the settings(I can't be sure if I updated Unity before the last build or after..), either way, all sorts of errors were cropping up in the web console, and no sound at all..   I finally found the following error and that led me down some more alleys that were mostly unrelated to the Unity incarnation of this problem.. 

"the buffer passed to decodeaudiodata contains an unknown content type"

After some reading I discovered that the new Unity+WebAssembly way of dealing with audio seems to be to just let the browser handle it, and that gets a little more complicated..  Each browser has a dislike of various common formats for one reason or another, so I found what seems to be a least common denominator... At least for FireFox and Chrome..

Long story short, I re-encoded all of my sound effects into 16bit PCM .ogg's..  And now things seem to be sounding appropriately again, at least there are sounds, and no more errors. :D

So, SlingBot Boarding v0.4.2: https://www.kongregate.com/games/WilliamOlyOlson/slingbot-boarding

letitsnow.gif.a2b524bc6597bce63b85aae915d06bff.gif

Let me know what needs fixin next!! ;)

 

3 likes 0 comments

Comments

Rutin

Good job! I like this update. :) The right click helps a lot.

February 04, 2019 07:06 AM
Septopus

Awesome, thanks!  Yeah, it's way less clumsy with the new camera angles.  I'm looking forward to adding a whole lot more actual game content in the next few, now that I've ironed out some of these wrinkles. :D

February 04, 2019 07:32 AM
Rutin

Cannot wait! Keep up the great work! :) 

February 04, 2019 07:35 AM
Awoken

I like the new look for sure.  That's pretty cool that I can watch my most epic jumps.  I think one of my jumps was half a kilometre hahaha.  I'm still working on getting through that hoop too.  I came across a big dome and it prevented me from going further.  What are they for?

February 05, 2019 12:05 AM
Septopus
1 hour ago, Awoken said:

I like the new look for sure.  That's pretty cool that I can watch my most epic jumps.  I think one of my jumps was half a kilometre hahaha.  I'm still working on getting through that hoop too.  I came across a big dome and it prevented me from going further.  What are they for?

Thanks man!  Yeah, the replay feature will be nice once I get it a little more refined.  I want it to record and persist those replays to a server, that way the master leader-board(doesn't exist yet), will have replay capabilities too.  More stuff I'm waiting on my server for...

The dome(s), there are 10 of them currently, and they do absolutely nothing as yet. ;)  They are surrounded by 10 turrets and I'm calling them "installations" for now, original I know, haha!  What WILL happen: once you destroy all of the outside defenses then the dome will fall down and you will be attacked by another level of defenses, this will probably involve one or more Ice Yettis(almost realized) and a few Machine Gun Bunnies(still entirely fictional).. :D

These "installations" will have a prize within them, probably many, some that are consumable and/or upgradeable/etc..  So you will be encouraged to sack them repeatedly, and possibly in specific sequences and/or there will be better rewards for destroying more without getting an Excessive Damage Reset(which returns you to start position and resets ALL park installations).  To keep things interesting, all aspects of their defenses will grow more difficult to defeat as you progress through the Arena Levels(prizes will get better).  There will also be player attributes that will increase via these same triggers and others, but those are also still fictional as well. ;)

Super Loop Technique Spoiler:

Spoiler

Straight velocity into the ramp segment: don't jump at the top.  You will fly right into the perfect position, jump the first gap, then turn about 15-20degrees to the right, this will put you up the vertical segment of the loop(instead of going upside-down and falling off).  When you jump the vertical gap you will probably come off the loop, you can turn to the right just a bit and your board should align itself with the correct part of the loop to get you going over the hump.  From there its just a matter of keeping track of your direction and jumping at the gaps.  If you don't see the "Arena Level 1" sign in front of you when you are at the top of the loop, you're going the wrong direction.

Also, if you haven't tried it, flight is pretty much doable.  To try it out easily(holding your forward thrust key down constantly), run full speed off the edge of the plateau and then simultaneously apply a frequent tap to your backflip button. ;)  I can throw a snowball from midair onto one of the turrets surrounding one of the domes and then land on the dome itself, without touching the ground(it takes almost a full tank of boostfuel though). :D   You can also go airborne from anywhere with a good enough jump to get you high enough to gain flip control.

There will be also be achievements and levels that require you to fly vertically, and other tricks, so practice some flying. ;)

February 05, 2019 01:23 AM
lawnjelly

You've added quite a bit since I last tried, well done. :) 

Thing that stood out imo that could be improved was the third person camera .. I found it very confusing. Sometimes it wasn't pointing at all where I was heading, so I had no sense of where I was going. And then when in the tube, as the physics moved you around the camera was moving around very quickly and I didn't know where I was going, or what way was up.

February 05, 2019 03:23 PM
Septopus
1 hour ago, lawnjelly said:

You've added quite a bit since I last tried, well done. :)

Thing that stood out imo that could be improved was the third person camera .. I found it very confusing. Sometimes it wasn't pointing at all where I was heading, so I had no sense of where I was going. And then when in the tube, as the physics moved you around the camera was moving around very quickly and I didn't know where I was going, or what way was up.

Thanks @lawnjelly!

Yeah, the camera takes a little getting used to.  If you are NOT holding right-click then the camera will be facing your velocity direction(constant lerp so it may lag slightly for some things...)  If you want the camera to face your "heading" then use right-click.   As you have stated, when you are in the loop if you don't complete it in one consistent forward motion, it will get very confusing and almost impossible.  It took me LOTS of tries to figure out how to solve the loop...If it continues to present trouble for folks though I may move it to a higher level where players will have more experience with the board/camera controls. ;)

One thing I think people don't immediately understand about this game, it's not designed for you to do anything with slow precision,   It's designed for high speed activities that have a high failure rate until you find the trick that makes it become easy. :D

I'll be posting more technique spoilers as I go too, so check those out if you get really stuck with something.

 

As well, I'm constantly trying to improve the camera, because I know it's confusing sometimes..  Just don't know what else would make it better.. at the moment.

 

Hmm, new idea.. I could include technique hints in recorded replay form in-game too..   That might really help.

February 05, 2019 04:52 PM
Awoken
On 2/5/2019 at 10:52 AM, Septopus said:

One thing I think people don't immediately understand about this game, it's not designed for you to do anything with slow precision,   It's designed for high speed activities that have a high failure rate until you find the trick that makes it become easy. :D

Just a thought;
If this is your intention what do you think about guiding people toward their own self discovery.  Right now when I play I can pretty much do anything I want, but am not very skilled at any of them.  I maybe need more guidance.

February 06, 2019 09:57 PM
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