Citadel - System Shock Fan Remake

[6741083034e7aJosiahJack]

I probably wouldn't change anything except for maybe do something about lighting.  Given all the strengths and weaknesses of different engines, Unity has the most comprehensive support.  Plus Unity is one of the only engines to support 3D as well as 2D (for HUD games!) and has good screen point to 3D raycast ability which is absolutely required for Inventory mode to work properly. 

It's just increasingly frustrating when more and more of my questions I look up are answered with "it's a Unity bug" like the light baking.  All my lights are realtime, this is my performance bottleneck.  I guess my questions have been getting more and more advanced though.

Like this most important question (Warning, technical rant detected):
How do I write a method to bake lighting that copies the realtime light output verbatim, as is, no changes, wholesale, perfectly, pixel for pixel, no bounce, just as I've already lit it, straight bake lighting as it is now to all objects marked as static, and then copy and apply all materials to be new instances with the diffuse as the baked result.  THEN, have all the stationary realtime lights (that also don't have a LightAnimation script) changed to be masked to only light up dynamic objects.  Then the only objects that would need to be affected by each render update would be any dynamic objects or static objects near an animated light that flickers and only in view frustum and only if not occluded, instead of ALL objects (except not in view frustum and not occluded ofc).

Whatever, performance is okayish at the moment around 50fps on my 2k monitor.  Can you tell this bugs me?  Currently Unity baking changes the lighting to be brighter in every case.  There's no way to remove the 1 bounce that Unity forces upon a bake.  And I'm not going to go through every light and retweak it, I'm not!  I want to finish this someday soon. 

[674108303502aJosiahJack]

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XW_tY_3RsY

(Resisting urge...to....go make a Quake 1 map....must finish Citadel!  Must...phew ok now that I got my pumpkin fix I can continue with Citadel work.  Crisis averted...ya I'm a goofball sometimes)

[6741083035196icemann]

Oh man Zylon's gona love this

[6741083035337JDoran]

That is great, JJ!

Note that I'm not asking if you have an approximate release date in mind for the first release of Citadel, as I don't want to seem pressing or anything. But if you do want to give a rough, close-to-the-ball-park, hazy, best-case scenario, maybe, perhaps, all-being-well, assuming no problems or real life hindrances crop up, don't quote me on this, subtle hint on when it will be released, then fair enough, we'll listen 

[674108303541dJosiahJack]

I feel festive 

[6741083035996Gawain]

Spring 2015

 

Good work so far!
Door models and animations look great!

I would enlarge the collision areas so that player can move freely.

[6741083035b0dvoodoo47]

I was just thinking about being a bit of an ass and quoting the original release date - thanks for resolving that conundrum for me.

[6741083035c25JosiahJack]

Lol, jerks.     That was before engine change due to gamebreaking bugs.

When it's done

[6741083035e62JDoran]

I feel festive 

Wow! 

[6741083035f98icemann]

Its Silver Shamrock day

[674108303607eJosiahJack]

vague reference alert

[67410830361c8JosiahJack]

"Blinking lights means science"

Stars are jumpy   Also 1000points to whoever guesses the quote correctly.

The lights actually are on staggered timers so they actually pulsate somewhat randomly, looks different the longer you watch it in-game.

[674108303648fRandomCat]

I downloaded your project to poke around and see how it's working. Very good work. I mainly poked around testbed.

1. Can you specify in github what version of Blender to download? The only reason I know what version to download is your response on previous page.
2. I don't have that much experience with Unity, and it threw several errors on me. It was mainly several scripts in folder "Unused". Something along the lines that they already defined in global namespace. I deleted them, except "CameraFarPlaneOcclussion.cs" it was used in Main camera.
3. Script "TouchHurt.cs" use "GetComponent<PlayerHealth>().TakeDamage(dd)", the "PlayerHealth.cs" doesn't have that function. poking around I found that this function is inside "HealthManager.cs"
4. If you are very close to wall you can threw objects outside it, well you can easily threw rifle at least.
5. You can go upwards on a wall in one direction, it's weird.
6. I'm not sure if it's a feture or a bug, but you move diagonally faster.
7. If you move diagonally toward wall when you in air you can cling to it.
8. I like that corpses remain, but I'm not sure they will be a good idea without some sort of timer that will make them disappear. They can block your path if you aren't lucky. And you can use them to climb to blocked areas. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
9. You can jump on npc_zerog_mutant it's pretty funny.
10. I'm not sure if it's my version somehow didn't import script properly or what. npc_flier_bot slowly move forward in its idle animation until it moves past walls. And npc_avian_mutant threw error when killed "Assertion failed on expression: 'CompareApproximately(det, 1.0F, .005F)'".

Hmm... yeah, that's all. Good luck with this project!

[6741083036690JosiahJack]

Ooh cool, bulk post.  You should be able to add bugs yourself on github Issues too if I remember right.
1. That's a good idea.
2.  Ah, I must have forgotten to remove that.  I need to purge Github at some point.  Lately I've just pasted over the folder from my working directory but I forget that it can leave scripts that I should delete, this also leaves some unnecessary files.
3. Need to remove, see 2.
4.  Known bug, need to test setting spawn point inside player's capsule or else check dist and throw behind player or to sides, whichever has room.
5.  Ya I forgot about that one.  Not sure what is going on yet but may be related to the ladder code.
6.  Uh sort of.  I thought I had already normalized the x,z movement velocity but maybe I left that in on accident.
7.  Huh, never tested that scenario, good catch.
8.  Ya, I probably need to make most of the bits non-colliders with player and NPC's but collide with raycasts for shooting and searching.  I have a layer for it called Corpse but haven't messed with setting it yet.
9.  And maint bot. It's fun.
10.1.  Flier bot animation for some reason is affecting the entire movement of the model child object.  For now I disabled his animator, need to reanimate using an armature with a single bone I think.
10.2.  I think I've fixed this one.  There was a quaternion call that wasn't on a normalized vector in the AIController.cs.

[67410830367d4JosiahJack]

Me working on Citadel in January:

Me working on Citadel now:

[674108303692eKolya]

You mean like last January? Or is it a prediction of your hibernation status next January?

[6741083036a2fJosiahJack]

   I'll leave it ambiguous for now   
It's crazy how accurate that 2nd gif is though.  I got a little burnt out yesterday after 6hrs straight of working on Citadel.

[6741083036b5cJosiahJack]

Slowly making my way through all the levels and linking switches, setting up triggers, locking doors, keying keycodes, animating unanimated lights, emailing emails, logging audiologs, relaying quest bits, enabling cyborg conversions, and leaving a swathe of polish and minor corrections in my wake.

[6741083036cd8JosiahJack]

Probably not going to show anything more for a good while, deep in the bugfixing now.  Just a bunch of code text and flipping back and forth between files.  Knocking them out bit by bit.  I might make it out of the first goodie closet on Medical in my playtesting someday without finding some little something not right 

And now for some reason the enemies are getting stuck flickering between Idle and Run...sometimes.  Bah!  At least I figured out why some could see through walls.

[6741083036e20JosiahJack]

Making lots of progress but it's a real slog

Get outta here Xzibit!

[6741083037113Kolya]

Bah!  At least I figured out why some could see through walls.

Supervision?

[6741083037246JosiahJack]

Oddly enough, both bugs were vision bugs and super stupid and now fixed.  Some walls were set to the wrong layer and weren't checked by the enemy sight raycasts.  When checking sight after having first seen the player, I was adding 1 to the height of the eyesourc (dumb hack from an earlier bugfix for something else) and it was putting the eye height above the ceiling which caused the enemy to then lose the player and flicker states.

[6741083037346JosiahJack]

Oh....just realized that about 5 or 6 seemingly unrelated bugs all have one common fix.  Aaaand now I'll be AFK for a few days.  Of course.

[67410830374b7JosiahJack]

I dunno guys, not feeling too festive.

Taking much longer for me to get some things done than I anticipated.  I keep running into things I haven't coded yet at every turn...simple crap like triggering a sound or displaying a message or testing if a quest bit is on, but there's so much more of it than I'd thought.

Some things lead to rabbit holes like yesterday I needed to have already destroyed screens but I knew I didn't have an ability to destroy screens yet so instead of just making a destroyed screen prefab no no I went and added the ability to destroy screens and set them as already destroyed.  I mean it needs added but it's not exactly mission critical.