Hey! Welcome back to the Sunday Devlogs: 2025 edition! Here we go!
You can read up on what we've been up to the past couple weeks on the Discord (spoiler alert: not this game!) but now that we're back, I figured I'd start the new year by tackling a really big personal pet peeve of mine.
Parser Jitter
When you strafe your parser back and forth, you may notice that it tends to get pretty jittery - the rotation and movement can "budge" around, which looks wonky, to say the least.
GIF slowed down 50% to see the jitter a bit better
This has always been really annoying to me, since I really care about our projects being as smooth as can be. It happens on fast computers, slow computers, the web and Steam versions. It's always been there. For the longest time, I tried to figure out ways to fix it to no avail. Convoluted "velocity-based" systems were overly complex and impossible to calibrate right, ease-based systems froze the parser in place.
However, since the game jam we partook in, a certain "interpolation" bundle offered another way to smoothly animate something without the bureaucracy of eases. Maybe this was the key..
..And indeed, it was! After a little bit of fine tuning, strafing the parser is now way, way smoother. Shockingly smooth to be honest. I wonder if the authors of that bundle laced it with anything.
This GIF also slowed down to 50%.
This does come with a tradeoff, though - because of the way it "smooths" the player's mouse movements, the parser can lag behind the mouse. However, this is impossible to notice when playing any levels in the game, and will really only affect you if you play custom levels beyond what the game can throw at you. Regardless, it's been made a setting™ just in case you'd like to disable it.
Controller Support Part 6: Electric Bickalix
At this point, it's been so long since 1.2 Part 1 came out, and it's so close to the release of Steam achievements for the engine, that controller support is going to be moved to the 1.3 update instead. By the time this update releases, the puzzle of controllers will (hopefully) be finally solved, done and dusted.
I'm aware that like, probably 2 people are concerned at all about controller support. However, when custom levels inevitably arrive, that number will almost certainly be greater. And that aside, why not have some extra things to show off on the Steam page with high quality implementation to boot?
Sorry this devlog was a little short again - I've been getting back into the college routine as things settle back into place, and good lord, there are things to do!! It's a lot, but it's rewarding to finish the day after grinding out lots of work across a myriad of classes, career building, and yes, this game.
Thanks for following the devlogs as always, and see you again in a week :).
-Encabulated Games