GModStore Gamemode Competition 2020!

Day 3 Progress

Today the big focus was starting the ship piloting/overview map (currently just in the top right of the player’s screen at all times)

Different ships can be travelling around on this map and collide with each other! Though there’s no captain’s chair yet so WASD moves the FPS character and the space ship :)

Tomorrow I plan to combine these disparate systems a bit more with basic ramming/boarding of other ships!

GModStore Gamemode Competition 2020!

Day 2 Progress

I focused a lot on the player movement interactions today to get the heavy feel I wanted, with view punches when you walk & chunky sound effects. This included getting some weapon first person view models in to test the style, though it looks a bit weird currently with the 3d enemies (default HL2 Combine Soldiers)

I expanded the ship editor system to support different sized parts, rather than just the 1x1 basics from yesterday, and made it spawn a physical ship with some placeholder enemies inside

As you can see in the video below I was also testing some lighting solutions a little, as I want to be able to power ships on/off via subsystems and have lots of interactions!

Tomorrow I’m probably going to start looking into the piloting/navigating of ships!

GModStore Gamemode Competition 2020!

[I competed back in 2018 with Heavy Gullets!]

The themes were announced last night; Space, Start With Nothing, or Procedural Generation

Ideas

Space

I’m currently leaning towards the space theme, taking inspiration from games like Void Bastards and Heat Signature.

Dungeon-crawly ships to loot and plunder!

Day 1 Progress

To that end I wanted to get started with the actual ships as soon as possible, so today mostly focused on making this Ship Editor! A top down layout/floorplan editor with modular pieces from Spacebuild

Currently only supports 1x1 size tiles but works with save/load support & collision!

I also experimented a little with some 2D billboarding inspired by Void Bastards

I’m planning to post my progress at the end of each day, so we’ll see how long that sticks!

I’ve been playing a lot of the classic Garry’s Mod gamemode Prop Hunt recently on a little personal server with friends, and so obviously I’ve been tweaking things here and there to make it my own.

One thing that always bothered me about prop hunt was how ‘flat’ the movement was, props just phase along the floor - so unrealistic! With this in mind, I decided to add; Legs

Now available via Github for anyone who wants to take a look at the inner workings

How it works

A beautiful bodge

Manipulating the view

Resetting the view to the center of the galactic map uses a series of AutoHotkey commands to zoom out, drag the mouse to orient as top down perspective, and then open the console and use the “goto 0 0” command to center the map.

Opening panels is always handled via hotkeys, which means VR-is doesn’t actually have knowledge of which panels are open/closed, only estimations based on an expected blank start state and the history of hotkeys it itself has pressed.

Different panels

To achieve the effect of having multiple panels open at once, those that aren’t currently open in Stellaris have their view paused (e.g. opening the technology panel will capture and freeze the view of planetary administration so it can be referenced but no updates will be visible!)

Currently panels are updated if the player touches them with their controller

Going forward this should be expanded into a full ScreenManager class which controls each individual panel and chooses which is being updated when (perhaps based on which one is the closest the the player’s view, and so probably what they are interested in)

Ship/Planet selection

These are simply handled by using the hotkeys 1-9, hardcoded in Unity for mockup purposes to be the planet on 1 and the fleet on 2

Sending input to Stellaris

AutoHotkey moves the mouse cursor based on relative position of VRTK controllers over each panel

Loading Systems/Hyperlanes

The Stellaris save format can be converted to JSON via this tool, which allows VR-is to display an overlay of the map ontop of the main screen (seen in the video as pink hyperlanes)

Requested features

Player at the center of a holographic galactic map

Possible and pretty easy based on current features, placing the player in the center of the galactic map loaded from the save.json would allow them to interact with this holographic/resizable/rotatable map while the code transforms this input back into 2d screen space to click the mouse for fleet movement

Ship art based on the selected leader background

Possible I guess, just a lot of art work

Communication on main screen

Not sure how to detect when communication arrives, but otherwise easy to place in a panel in the scene somewhere

Home planet visible from windows

Possible but it would be a static view, due to only being able to have one camera!

Multiplayer, commanding the same empire

Possible by streaming Stellaris capture to all connected players, and sending back and input via AutoHotkey, however in this bodge solution they would quickly be overwriting/messing up each others commands as they all try to input at once

Maybe it would have to work like an old timeshare? Haha

Galactic community

I imagine this as putting on an AR headset overlay which would display the community voting chamber, and being able to see the actual empires in the balconies of the side they are voting for!

Unfortunately I don’t see how this could be possible currently other than trying to do image recognition on the empire flags, or just hardcoding it

Project navigation

Supports SteamVR currently but others would be easy to add due to VRTK

Assets/StreamingAssets contains all the AutoHotkey scripts:

• panic.ahk - Useful in case you lock yourself in Stellaris through panel interactions (Ctrl+F1 will exit play mode in Unity)
• resetview.ahk - Run when the player hits the "Reset View" button in VR, tries to recenter the view as top down and showing the whole galaxy

Required

Stellaris

Tom’s Hotkeys (Stellaris Mod - adds ability to open Tech panel on T)

OBS (May have to scale down output resolution due to resource intensity of Stellaris and OBS and Unity)

OBS-VirtualCam (Target “OBS-Camera”, no buffered frames)

AutoHotkey

Unity 2019.3.4f1

Stellaris Save to JSON

Related:

Portfolio Page

The results of Rainbow Jam 2019 are in!

Play the game here!

I have returned to Dundee after 3 great years at PreviewLabs in Belgium.

Now I’m going to try working on my own terms as a freelancer, initially with PreviewLabs as a client but hopefully branching out as well!
I’ve also joined Biome Collective to help support this.

Today’s prototype!

I was inspired by playing the beautiful Eastshade (an open world painting game) but was disappointed to find no painting minigame, so of course I just had to mock one up myself.

It was originally implemented with the plan of simply using the mouse cursor to paint but then I remembered this plugin which allows the Leap Motion Controller to be used in Garry’s Mod, and again - just had to try it.

How it works is actually really simple!

The player performs a short calibration at the start; by positioning their hand (yes, hand - the brush is just a prop :]) to define 3 corners of the game window. Then their hand can be tracked relative to these to allow painting, with distance from the screen being converted to brush size.

So when the player decides on a perspective to paint a raw, normal screenshot is immediately taken and stored locally. From there it’s just drawing to various render textures in order to ‘reveal’ the part of the image under the brush & applying the selected ‘paint’. I’m using what I learned from the Magic: Anomolies to apply shaders & post-processes to the ‘paint’ to achieve different effects - these different styles are linked to the numpad as a sort of mock artist palette! These render textures caused a lot of issues with them not handling transparency as expected & their lack of documentation - but the end result is so worth it!

I had forgotten just how much fun the Leap is!

We used it for our Tragic Magic jam game and the added physicality is always just a blast!

I moved to Belgium!
Just formalised the paperwork with rapid prototyping studio PreviewLabs and moved over to work on-site in their offices, my first industry job and it sounds really exciting!

My first project is a math game for Yale University.