This month was a pretty intense crunch time for us, but we did make time for progressing with OLP.
Some of the systems we've integrated include head/eye IKs.
These were already included in the original OLP, but as a sort of always-on feature that we were surprised even worked. The version we've created now is only active when it absolutely needs to be.
IKs are activated when the character gets near an interactable item (in this case, a pickup). Once the item gets in range, it sends an overlap event that turns on the IK and saves the item's position.
This next part caused us some headache at first: if an item isn't moving, there's no need to get its position every tick. So we turned on sleep/wake events for the item to let the player character know when it was moving or physically active, so now the position only gets updated when it is absolutely necessary. We also included kill switches for the head and eye IKs separately, so when the characters are so small on the screen or running so fast that they wouldn't be visible anyways, they don't get calculated.
The most unnecessary feature we added in relation to this is a blink for when the IKs get activated or deactivated. Since the eye pops onto the target object immediately, it looked weird, but the blink fixes this. So even though it's unnecessary, we kind of like it.
Oh, and the Lookat node inside AnimBlueprints is a broken nightmare. We still have to do something about the head IK's transitions.
In other news, we are traveling to Tokyo next month!
At first, it was my (Lussy's) idea to go, and Geril was a little reluctant. But after checking out all the generously packed video game stores online, even he is pretty hyped up about the trip. We're pretty sure we'll be back at the end of next month with at least one very weird story about it.
Laters!
