Been a long while since an update has hit the public branch.
KoboldKare has been a project that has been in constant turmoil as I learn more and more about game development.
I realized at some point that I was using my technical ability as a crutch to avoid doing art.
Instead of just spending an hour or two making some fun clouds, I'd overengineer the problem into oblivion trying to make "technically correct" clouds via raytracing and tearing into the render pipeline to get what I want.
Many of the changes for this build is me replacing awful, overengineered, and slow solutions with some basic VFX and game-design.
I'd say I've gotten KoboldKare 90% to where my vision is. I still have lots to do, but now I actually can see the finish line. I plan to get KoboldKare to 1.0 within 5 weeks from this post.
That's enough of me rambling about my thoughts, HERES THE PATCH NOTES:
- Penetration tech refactor. This change is large enough that I wrote all of the details on the official KoboldKare website as a technical article. You can check it out here. In general, I'm no longer flubbing the math on penetrations, and the shaders I use are more optimized.
- Ray-traced clouds were replaced with standard VFX work. Drastically reducing rendering cost.
- Fluid visuals overhaul, replaced the expensive and touchy fluid simulation with some standard VFX.
- Eclipse, and the concept of night has been completely eliminated. No more worrying about nighttime, or being outside. With the introduction of other mechanics, it was largely unnecessary to keep. Plants simply grow after 30 seconds of being watered, energy can be restored on kobolds by resting on the bed, quests are received as soon as they arrive, stores restocks over time. Etc!
- Three new kobolds stats: Energy, Belly capacity, and Metabolization capacity.
- Kobolds now have energy bars, they consume energy to do the vast majority of their tasks. Tuck them in bed to get it back! Soon there will be ways to increase or regenerate energy...
- Belly capacity is limited, don't overfill them. Use the toilet to empty their belly if they're too full. Soon there will be ways to increase this limitation.
- Metabolization capacity is limited, kobolds can only metabolize so much fluid before they max out! There is currently no way to increase this limitation, except for breeding of course.
- Introduction of Kobold traits and breeding! Kobolds now track a set of traits that are passed onto their offspring, this includes traits that have modified via juices! Offspring also spawn with an empty metabolization bar-- meaning you can repeat the modifications to begin breeds of kobolds with specific traits! You can guess the relations by just looking at the colors.
- The ability for players to change themselves in game has been drastically limited, you can no longer equip dildos, you cannot customize yourself real-time via the options menu, and you are subject to the same metabolization limitations as any other kobolds. However...
- Added a consciousness swapping machine, for the low low price of losing your original vessel, you can embody one of the Kobolds on the farm that suits you better.
- Buckets and several other containers are now drinkable. Simply use them to drink some of their contents.
- New item and reagent: Mushroom. It poisons your kobolds! Shrinking all their stats and making them pale. Careful with this one!
- New machines are found on the farm. The Grinder, Milking Table, Breeding Mounts, Kobold Press, Consciousness Swapper, and Egg Laying machines are all usables that cost various resources to use.
- All animation stations are now usable just like Machines are, the bottoming kobold will always go first.
- Kobold AI will now "use" things you set them near, careful with setting them near buckets of expensive fluids!
- Networking is now ownership based, when a client "owns" an object, they are fully responsible for relaying its state to other players. This means when you own an object, there will be zero lag for interacting with it. Included a security feature where jumping will force ownership back to yourself, so you can prevent other players from grabbing or interacting with you.
- Ragdolls are now fully networked, tossing players, pinning them, and doing various things with them are now sent through the network as a "playback", and everyone will see the same thing!
- Ragdoll refactor, all ragdolls use ConfigurableJoints instead of CharacterJoints in order to simulate muscle tension. This leads to ragdolls crumpling less and looking more natural.
- Precision grabber refactor!
This has taken a long time to figure out. Ragdolls in Unity are special and cannot actually be affected by angular velocity sets like other Rigidbodies. I learned I must use constraints instead!
Now always ragdolls kobolds, respects player colors, can properly rotate ragdoll limbs, and is visible to all players holding shift.
Making kobolds and objects pose exactly the way you want has never been easier.
You can see above that a green player has posed this kobold to sit near the table and wave.
You can also now unpin individual pins by aiming at them and tapping Q, holding Q will unpin all active pins.
- Farm plot is now a discrete grid of plantable terrain. Unlock new grid tiles with explosives.
- Holding the rotate key (R by default) now takes direct control of the hips.
This even works on animation stations, but not during ragdoll.
- Mousewheel now gives analogue control of crouch height, use this in combination with hip control to very precisely do things with your lower body.
- You now recieve mail, they come as objectives from the mysterious Dragon Patron. The objectives are currently a TODO, but you can complete them and earn stars which unlock parts of the city!
- New dick stubbiness customization. Dicks can be stubby and thick, or long and thin, by up to 50% in either direction!
- Body proportions have been temporarily disabled as I learn how to integrate them with inheritable traits in a fun way.
- Jiggle physics refactor, all jiggle physics in the game has been replaced by a much more physically accurate and stable system.
- Money is now a consumable physics item. Money is now also tracked per-kobold, collaborate with your fellow kobolds!
- Terrain is now static and no longer generated on the fly. This leads to much faster load times.
- Since there's no more dynamic day cycle, reflection probes are now also static. This should lead to less hitching while playing the game.
- Decals now use a dilation technique to hide seams. It still isn't perfect, but it no longer relies on Conservative Rasterization which simply wasn't supported on lots of platforms, and looked really bad in other situations.
- Alternative graphics APIs have been disabled. DirectX, Metal, and Vulkan are now the only supported graphics APIs. This was too difficult to maintain as a solo developer, and may come back after the game is more complete.
- The Overall Graphics option has been reduced to "High", and "Low", this is to reduce the number of variants needed to compile the game. It still takes a ridiculous amount of time to compile, but I managed to get it down to around 20 minutes.
I probably missed a ton of changes. Oh well!
There's still a lot of greyboxing, temporary effects, and barely realized mechanics. Though I've played it with a few friends and its an absolute blast! I'm hoping to clean it up over the course of the next few weeks.