Testing out more FPS animation stuff. Definitely need to set up a good system for allowing spine/head movement from animations. Punches without a little screen shake or windup feel weak.

Everything's lining up with the camera well though!

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Another pointing post, but I've got the FPS animation IK set up pretty nicely now.

Looking around maintains more complex positions like the crouch, and still keeps the hands always pointing exactly where I expect them to be when the player is using them.

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Still working on the character controller for Hadostruct.

Today I networked the left/right arm controllers, so now you can be pointed at by your friends!

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Before finding that talk, I was just rendering at half resolution and then blurring it as I upscaled.
Which worked, but it was a bit pixelated and couldn't go any lower than 1/2 resolution without looking really bad.

The new system looks better even at 1/4 or lower, and runs faster.

It's a bit noisy this far out, but the volumetric lights can even be rendered from over 200m away. Instead of sampling at consistent step lengths, I'm sampling on a curve so that volumetrics have a higher sample rate closer to the camera.

Another dev log about Hadostruct's lighting because I'm super happy with where it is now!

This is actually 8x downscaled volumetrics. Even at such a low render resolution they can still show shadow details and keep the surface of the water well defined.

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The trick ended up being a modeling workflow change, actually.

If you have a smooth-shaded non-segmented mesh, you can copy the normal data over from that to a segmented mesh using a Data Transfer modifier in Blender.

Messing with normals can achieve a lot of fun effects!

Character models in Hadostruct are fully segmented, but I want them to look like they're all one mesh. I spent a little bit recently figuring out how to emulate that.

The end result is pretty fun, being able to 'pull apart' what looks like a single mesh.

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Today's focus was on getting first person animations to match the camera direction at all times. It's not quite there yet, but I made a lot of progress.
Also, made some new animations for pointing and idle to replace the ones I had!

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It's been so much fun working on all of these systems for the game. I really want to be able to nail the visuals of lights shining into and out of windows in a deep ocean.

That's enough of a thread on the lighting for now. It's very fun to look back on how it's shaped up!

It's got full control of the volume properties too, so I can make liquid profiles and swap them out on the fly, even on a per-room basis. The same goes for the atmosphere in each volume, in case I wanted thicker or colored fog.

Since the game will involve submarines flooded structures, I needed to also support multiple water volumes.

So it also supports water volumes that can be filled and emptied. That way individual rooms can flood and the lighting will work fine between them!

It's all done through a base shader that I set up for all objects in the game, so the water is always present.

I have a 'water plane' for rendering the foam on the top of the water, but all the lighting effects are part of the base shader.

When I started work on Hadostruct, I knew it was going involve a lot of water. The first month was nearly all researching water shaders and volumetrics.

I'm really happy with where it's at now! Light changes color as it passes through liquids, which has some really cool effects.

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Hello Bluesky! Indie dev (and modder) here, new to the platform and looking to start networking and posting dev logs. My current project is a first person submarine sim that I've been working on for the past month.
Here's a video of testing I was doing today with IK pointing.

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