MyRobot Development Part 44

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

• Mini Map

• Emotions

• Session Improvements

Mini Map

The Mini Map will be used to navigate around the large map. It current displays nearby presents, iridium, fast travel points, and other robot heads (in case you lose yours somehow).

It's a very neat shader which renders a sphere. Everything inside the sphere gets turned into a world space planar projection for the map texture. The map at the moment is 6000x3000 meters and so the 2k resolution of the entire map cannot cover tiny details of the world. So to work around this I blurred the map texture and stair stepped it to produce smooth topological looking lines, like a real map! After that it was just a matter of spawning other objects inside it and clipping them if they are outside the sphere.

Emotions

This is a big one! First the objective: To produce a lot more animation reactions based on various gameplay scenarios and smoothly blend between them and sometimes play on top of each other multiple animations. The system does just that! For example, if the robot is moving forward but you start poking it hard from behind, it will correctly turn around to face you, smirk at you, and then resume walking.

Much of the handling for this has to do with correctly managing lots of C# states. The "Tree Context System" (I spoke about this a few months ago), is the name of the "engine" that powers all of this logic in the robot. It's very efficient thanks to its event based system.

On top of this system I have started to implement emotions. Currently supports angry and happy states. Once you switch to a happy or angry state, the entire animation set for the robot changes to reflect this new emotional state. Because of this, the cost of animating doubles! So, this week I also added motion capturing to my development stack for fast FAST animating. The only downside is that the result is still note quite perfect and requires me to manually animate facial features and do some clean up. Regardless it's still a humongous development speed improvement. I am using a paid AI subscription for this.

This coming week and the week after that I will keep working on more animations and emotional reactions.

Session Improvements

 Sessions in this coming update will come with full-persistent support so if you won't lose progress when a new build for the game comes out. This was previously not possible since if I moved or renamed assets, it would break the link for referencing what to save.

In the medium term horizon, the saves will be manually carried over in a game launcher. For now they will have to be manually copied between game build folders.

Really great start to 2025!

Stay Tuned!