Welcome to second dev blog! This week we're going to talk about the rover and some of the new mechanics that have been introduced in game. Before we get to that though, here are some good news!
Valve has now decided that Gaia is worthy of Steam Trading Cards! That includes the cards, badges, emoticons and profile backgrounds, We will be introducing these at some point in the near future, but first we wanted some feedback from you guys. Would you like to have these implemented? Got any suggestions? Let us know in the comments, community hub or discord! I'm personally looking forward for the emoticons.
Right, now onto the dev blog. Last time, we talked about the upcoming Vehicle package and we mentioned the rover (Rompo for scale):
Most technical work has been completed. The rover is fully integrated within the game. Here's list of what has been accomplished during this past week:
1. A new vehicle controller has been introduced into the game. Although it's only applied to the rover, it could be applied to other vehicles with wheels as well. The controller has support for driving (duh), honking, fuel, damage, hand and normal brakes and x wheel drive. There's also a whole bunch of physics related stuff, such as torque, max speed, suspension, gear, aerodynamics such as air drag and air rotation, tire slips and other tire factors, RPM, anti roll force, ground friction, water friction and more. On the FX side, the controller has support for a whole bunch of different sounds such as ground sounds depending on the terrain texture under the tires, engine sound, impact sound, braking sound, wind sound in case you go really fast, skid sound and horn sound. For visual effects, we have particles for dirt caused by wheels, skid marks that depend on the wheel size and the terrain texture under the wheel, smoke for when the vehicle gets damaged too much and lights at different locations on the rover.
2. Some stats about the rover (Some of these will change, but here's the big picture for you car lovers out there):
Max speed: 60kmh
Torque: 1.25 on a scale from 0 to 10.
RPM: min 850, max 7000
Wheels: 6 wheels, 4 wheel drive. Front wheels receive the hand brake and accept turn
Right now, the vehicle has all these cool, high end capabilities, but they're filled with placeholders. For example, the sound the engine makes sounds like a race car and braking sounds like braking on asphalt. Dying just makes the rover go poof, like most other buildings (indeed, the rover is considered a building as it uses the same mechanics to be built and serialized.) As was said before, right now we're focusing on introducing mechanics. Assets will come later!
3. Physics, physics everywhere! The base code has changed quite a bit to allow many things to respond to physics. Most objects in the world were static up until now. They still are... unless you get onto your rover and start ramming onto them. Certain objects will now have physics enabled if you're inside the rover and close to them so they can respond to collision. These objects include all flora and ancient items. Sorry guys, trees are still as strong as the universe.
4. Speaking of physics, all ground AI now has ragdoll physics. Again, these would only be enabled if you were to ram into them with a rover. Otherwise they'll play good old fashioned death animations when killed with anything else. As you've seen on the pic above, the rompo is smaller than the height of the rover cabin, so don't be surprised if you run over it and it doesn't die. If you want to hit the rompo, you gotta ram into him with the wheels! So yeah, physics are quite accurate in this regard.
Here are some weevils after an encounter with the front bumper of the rover:
5. You can even use the rover underwater as it's watertight. So you can be cruising on the currently empty ocean floor if you'd like, but you'll be running out of oxygen.
If you remember from the last blog, we said we hoped we'd be done with implementing the rover by the end of this week so we can move on to the mech. Well, sadly we're not done yet. There's still a bit left to do, but what exactly?
Well, obviously there's still this whole issue of placeholder sounds, particle effects and lack of animations (entering the vehicle happens instantly, whereas we would like to have an animation for that since the vehicle has an interior and its doors can be animated). This will come in a later alpha that will be dedicated SOLELY to polishing as many aspects of the game as possible. Then there is the 'balancing' factor. As you guys know, every game has to be balanced, especially the vanilla version. Can't just bump into every AI you see and collect free food while the only cost to you is repairing the vehicle at literally no cost.
Therefore, we'll need 2 new mechanics: a fuel mechanic so as to not make it possible to drive endlessly that works with the mech as well and some sort of disadvantage for ramming into things.
The first one is easy. The vehicle controller already supports fuel and there is 'Hydrazine' in the game, so we'll be using hydrazine to power up the rover. We'll just need to create some new UI to show this and other vehicle stats.
The second one is a bit harder. Right now, when you bump into something, the vehicle loses a certain amount of HP based on the force with which you collide. The lower the HP is, the less torque the vehicle has so you won't even be able to accelerate at some point anymore, especially on a slope. This is all nice and dandy, but nothing prevents the player from colliding a few times, getting out and repairing and rinse and repeat. This can easily be abused for infinite ramming of AI. One possible solution to this is to introduce some sort of cost to repairing things. Our current design choice is to introduce a new item that can be wielded, called 'Repair tool'. Much like Subnautica, it would need batteries to function. However this goes beyond the scope of this alpha, so until we get to the 'Equipment package' alpha, we'll be stuck with infinite free repairing.
We also need to re-balance the game a bit. Since we now have the possibility to explore the whole map, we need to make some rare resources spawn much farther and be more widespread than where they are right now. That includes diamonds, gold and ancient items. We also need to work on a few more technical aspects, such as serialization.
All in all, it looks like we'll be spending another week on working on the rover mechanics before moving on to the mech.
See you next week and don't forget to let us know your opinions about trading cards!