September 2022 Updates!

Wow, September was a busy month! 

Lots of art got made and our world got a lot more lively. 

First of all, the Firearms are done for Vertical Slice, and this is just a selection of the final total from each Era:

We have Percussion Cap & Flintlocks from the 1400-1800s, late 1800s-early 1900s Revolvers and Lever Actions, Cold War era Automatics, Modern Firearms, and finally Future Tech. 

This goes to pile on top of our existing Stone and Iron/Bronze Age weapons like Slingshots, Bows & Arrows, and Swords & Spears. 

Most of these weapons you'll only maybe find 1 of them in the game -- likely on your person, at the start, according to your chosen backstory.

The rest you can finally build as you reach the mid to late game, with some being rare acquisitions only carried by highly dangerous enemies. 

Morningingstar's universe is set on a fragment of an alien mega-structure where peoples from across time and space have ended up, along with their technology. The technologies they began with informed later civilizations to try to replicate them, causing an interesting mix of ancient or new arrivals, with local inventions. 

There are some Fragments that contain advanced civilizations capable of building Grav Ships, traveling the expanse between their nearby homeworlds. Some of these have attempted to colonize Morgana Fragment, where you are, and have left behind their modern and advanced tools for you to acquire. 

While the game begins with Primitive Survival as you first arrive lost and alone in this strange place, you'll soon discover the main factions of Iron Age civilizations that dominate this world. 

But as you get established with your knowledge of modern Earth tech, you'll find other Travelers from your time with the expertise to restart civilization and modern technology. Together, along with the donations of crashed Grav Ships and Ancient Ruins, you'll have enough technology to begin an industrial and modern revolution. 

As you take further steps, you'll even capture strange future tech, and some alien devices. 

Get your base powered up with Batteries, Fuel, and and Power Sources! 

Allegra has also been hard at work on fleshing out faction clothing and armors! We're making steady progress towards our Vertical slice on that front as well.

Kent has been working daily on our Character Generation this moth, optimizing out unwanted performance issues, and bringing hard coded prototype elements into line with our more abstract and public Symbols. This has come along with helpful tools on our end, such as a scraper that looks through a folder for art assets and their rotations to add them to a Symbol so we don't have to do it manually for hundreds of assets with 5-8 rotations.  

This was complimented by James's work where he is adding similar equipment Symbols to the bones in his animation system, which requires Kent's work on our Character Renderer.  All the myriad layers of art that build up a character, from their eyes, nose, head, mouth, hair -- to all the armor and shields -- need to be layer sorted and saved in such a way as to use minimal texture memory, and mip down for various zoom levels. 

It's a highly complex system for how simple it appears on screen, and the work between James and Kent has helped ensure its long term performance.

Finally, James has completely ripped out Unity's Playables API and replaced it with our own brand new API we're temporarily calling "Symbol Animation Framework."

The biggest issue here is that our Event system needed to account for layers of animations, such as swinging a sword while running. 

If we can't interrupt these events for things like, getting hit, blocking sword swings, dying, etc, then the animation system couldn't interrupt the event data nor blend between animation frames. That would look janky, and be janky, as a sword swung and blocked would continue the swing and try to deal damage! 

All that is gone with Symbol Animation Framework. 

As a modder, if you looked into RimWorld or similar XML driven games, or even something like Bethesda's Creation Kit, you'll be familiar with the idea of inherited sets of animations and item properties. We do the same on Morningstar. So when you make a new mod and want to create just a simple new weapon with new art and stats, you can simply inherit the animation sets from their Equipment Symbol and reuse them. 

The length of the weapon's damage and block distance, its damage properties, sound cues, that can all be modified to fit the new weapon, reusing the animation set. 

Not only does this empower us to do amazing little animations that bring an otherwise static game to life, but it empowers modders to do the exact same thing.

Even on New California, adding animations was a huge pain requiring multiple softwears and incredible talent. 

Here, modders will be able to hack together animations fairly quickly with minimal or even beginner experience levels. It still takes practice to get good at it, but the tools enable it to be a fairly painless process of animating keyframes and saving out animation files in every rotation, without a huge headache. 

We are now moving on to begin dealing damage, creating animation content with the framework, and establishing the first "combos" which chain animations together to perform more powerful attacks. That will be the path that the rest of development takes and become our daily progress, along with updates to this new framework which at this point only borrows Unity's timeline feature -- everything else is built from scratch.

Finally, from Curtis, he's been working on the Procedural Generation of our maps terrain for the last few months, and invented an all new custom UI for the Map Editor. 

Our game is silly complicated, and almost none of it is static. 

Grass & Trees can grow and die, Cliffs can be demolished and Farms transform terrain -- it's VERY complicated. 

Generating the terrain is also a large source of the joy of discovering a map and deciding where you want to build a base, or how best to attack an enemy camp. 

We also need, on the Developer side, a way to intentionally control the shape of these maps, such as a Caldera for a volcano, or a specific shape to a mountain or river pass, which feature on "Hero" maps.

To do this we need an editor that can take "stamps" that create either fully generated math shapes, or defined textures, to impose that shape on the map.

Finally we also want the ability to manually paint terrain with a brush in-game and in the editor, so we can test our art kits. We also need to save those maps for the hard drive, so maps can be saved and loaded when players leave that map and come back later.

Morningstar's Map Generation System is our answer to those issues. 

What all this does is create the various layers of our local map's generates steps.

We have Hydrology, Foliage, Geology, And Miscellaneous other details. We're looking at creating Lakes, Landmasses, and having our greenery follow some rational growth denser near a water source and more sparse further away. 

This is the base layer of the Proc-Gen, which is just the terrain tiles that are underneath things like cliffs, items, water, etc. 

This UI holds that Landscape Graph, like a Shader Graph, so we can modify properties on a per-biome basis, and save those definitions out. So that Volcanic Caldera biome map or the Mountainous Lakes, that can all be rigged up in these graphs and saved for the game to call up when needed. 

We're beginning to look at something visually interesting to show off in the next few weeks as far as the actual terrain goes. Then begin adding items to the worldspace, such as trees, rocks, etc, to start creating our first look at what a playable Morningstar landscape looks like. 

Stick with us and soon we'll be able to show some really cool stuff. :)