Braaaains… — July Dev Blog
A lot has happened on the project since our anniversary dev blog. We have realized that dev blogs are great not only for you guys, but it also greatly encourages the team to keep pushing the boundaries. So expect these more frequently! We’ve accomplished quite a few things since we’ve last talked to all of you, so lets dive right in!
The Return of the Twitter
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This month we had finally brought back our Twitter account! For those who do not know, back in January our official Twitter account had been compromised, it had come to our attention when some very… strange tweets had been sent out from the account to say the least. From there, we decided that making a new Twitter account was the least of our priorities up until June. When we released our anniversary dev blog it gave us insight as to how important communication is with our fans and supporters, so we had begun to create a plan to connect with all of you more often. We started by touching up our logo to better represent the character of Percy (and to give it some much needed love).
Left: Old Right: New
Then, we had planned on having the Twitter serve as a transparent connection between us and all of you, meaning we’ll put out tweets of features in development or bugs that we find entertaining.
And to wrap up our plan, we wanted to continue doing the dev blogs as it serves as an opportunity for you guys to get some in-depth insight into the progress and hard work that goes into the project. We also like writing them!
The Notion of Motion (Capture)
Some fun technology we have been diving into recently has been motion capture or MoCap for short. MoCap has allowed us to bring sequences we have had on the drawing board to life. Now, we have a bit of a strange way of doing MoCap which utilizes a VR Headset + Controllers, Vive Trackers, OpenVR Motion Capture software, and last but not least Garry’s Mod. It is extremely unconventional but just works so well! Each aspect of our system is vital and serves an important role. The VR hardware, trackers, and MoCap software are pretty self-explanatory, it allows us to track the actor and save the MoCap data. The aspect that most likely surprises you is Garry’s Mod,
Actor preparing to kick down a door.
essentially the game serves the purpose of being a virtual studio which we can manipulate to create a set for the actors. We have team members play all sorts of roles such as, co-actors, stagehands, and placeholder voice actors. We utilize the VRMod addon developed by Catse to show the MoCap actor’s movements and also have the stagehand/co-actor get a feel for how it’d look in VR. The stagehand can add props to environments so the actor can visualize the environment.
The Thing We’ve Been Dying To Show
Our project lead Paradox took it upon himself to recreate the zombie_classic.vmdl basically 1:1. He had extracted roughly 400 animations by hand, which he then had to add multiple animevents 1 by 1 to each animation. Not to mention all the other demanding aspects of trying to recreate vmdls. The best part about all of this is, as of today it is publicly available for everyone to use! Creators can use this to create zombie model replacements, add custom animations, or make entirely new enemies to take the zombie’s place. The sky is the limit! We made this so we could utilize our custom zombie models to their fullest potential and also to allow others to create new zombies!
‘Til Next Time
Thanks for reading the dev blog all the way through! We put a lot of love and care into these so reading all the way through means the world to us. We’re glad we could show some of the cool stuff we have been working on over the past few months. Hope to see you all again, very very soon.
