Project Revamp Part 6 (Patreon)

Development post was delayed due to Christmas. But here is the last 7 days of progress!

The technical:

The battery is actually slightly complicated because it was yet another variable in the physics of the ragdoll. See, there is a variable called pin value that dictates how strong the forces are on the ragdoll for it to stand in a pose. With the battery, there are now several reasons to turn off or on the pin value. I wasn't going to do a silly if if if if if with dozens of bool values to check, so instead I made something called a limit group. It's basically a list of reasons (enums in this case) that blanket whitelists/blacklists the final result.

The HUD ui has a nice blurry effect in its background so it's easier to see when it's on your screen. The tricky part about it is that doing blur in URP is kind of a pain in the ass. So for now I settled on a custom stochastic blur that mimics Poisson distribution. It's good enough for now:

As for the pathfinding. I had to make it a tiny bit custom. The goal is to make the robot follow a path. In its simplest form it's a line (or multiple lines). So given a line, the robot must follow the line as closely as possible. Unfortunately it is not as simple as just going to the end of the line:

This can cause issues if the robot ever detracts from the line because it can get stuck in obstacles in places where the path was not calculated. The simple solution is to recalculate the path if it gets far away enough but it can also be alleviated by first trying to get on the path as fast as possible. This requires not going to the end of the line, but to the closest point on the line. Like so:

This helped tremendously although the recalculating of the path is still necessary if the deviation is large enough.

That was pretty much it for the past few days. I think I'll work on some environment next so a bit of exploration is available. I have an idea where you will have to use your robot to reach places and cooperate to unlock places.

Stay tuned!