What a month for an indie developer...

Had to send my monitor for repair and will take 2 to 3 weeks to get it back, so using a backup monitor for now but it is so small that all my tools do not fit into this screen, anyway not much to complain, but have to be away from the development cycle for a week due to some personal issues so I will have the time to upload the preview movie of the framework after I come back. Crossing fingers to be fine in the next couple of weeks and get back to release the game I've been working on for the past year

Time goes so fast since my last update!

Wow, I just noticed that it was almost a month since my last update, and a lot progress has been made. Inverse Kinematic is a lot harder to implement in a systematic way, testing and hardcoding bone indexes was quite easy to do and worked fine, but this same method didn't work if I wanted to expand it to the full skeleton, and worse, I had to rewrite the code quite many times to make it usable, just today rewrote the patch rendering logic due to a wrong assumption on how IK will modify the rotation angles, anyway I am quite happy with the results I am having now.

Now most of the basic animation tools are almost ready, and thinking how to implement an easier way to manage so many parameters and made the less number of mistakes, I have been searching for many ways to organize data and how it will be linked but so far I haven't found yet a convincing way to do it. I have many new ideas for my next game, and all the work I've been doing for this game will serve well for the next, even if the next one will be very different than Elem3ntz!. , I promise that I will publish a quick video of the editor by next week.

Mystic Framework

It has been a very busy week but things are getting better with the Mystic Framwork animation system that will power my games. This is the logo for the framework for the XBOX360 and Windows.

the test play will start soon to verify that all modules are working correctly so I can focus later on puzzles and animations for Elem3ntz! game.

Inverse Kinematics...

It has been a very exciting month, decided to take a little break and see what the world has to offer, and end up playing a few games in rush mode so I can continue development quicker, I got attached to FTL (Faster Than Light) and think it is a nice game beat it with most ships but got tired after 6 days of playing it, then moved to TorchLight2 and I wanted to see what's the difference between Diablo3 and Torchlight2, I just rushed through it, and finishing it during the weekend, and it is worth every penny, but I feel I lost a lot of its content by just playing alone and just rushing to the next dungeon or area without reading much, just kill and go to the next star, didn't spent a lot of time trying to find what skill to use or what gear to use , I just kept upgrading as long as the stats were higher. I only played Diablo3 during the Beta and I didn't feel things were right, compare to Torchlight I think things are a little bit better but I do not recall much of it, not many memorable battles, maybe I should have played slowly trying to digest the content... maybe I spent too much time with Diablo2 in the past and T2 just went through a flashback, anyway, finally spent a few days doing XBLIG playtesting of many great Indie games, looking at other's master pieces inspire me to do better.

So, now back to Elem3ntz! and the animation editor, about a month I got stuck trying to find a nice way to implement Inverse Kinematics since I got a lot of trouble trying to animate characters while standing in one place, it is easier if everything is in motion but not so much when you want to pin both legs and balance the body while juggling with hands, finally I figure out how to integrate the IK system developed before the gaming sessions into the animation framework, a video will be uploaded for you to see once I finish updating the UI to enable interactive IK on screen.  I am still wondering what should be the best approach for games under XBOX, I haven't tested yet if the IK solution will run on XBOX360 without using lots of resource, probably I will find out that soon, but at least there is a backup plan for that, the IK solution can be baked easily into keyframes so in both cases the IK solution will still work with good performance.

Sometimes I think I should read more but there is no time...isn't it?

I spent many days this week trying to get the XML load/save functionality of scenes and got that working in a very complex way, took me 24 hours this week to make the code to work and still it lacks some functionality around the animation settings and physics, suddenly, something came to my mind and it ticked in my mind thinking why there isn't any solution already build in the XNA framework to handle all this for me instead of me writting thousands of lines of code to format and properly create THE XML file I am looking for.... and in a matter of 2 minutes after thinking I found this:

XmlWriterSettings xmlSettings = new XmlWriterSettings();
xmlSettings.Indent = true;

using (XmlWriter xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create("testAniPack.xml", xmlSettings))
                IntermediateSerializer.Serialize(xmlWriter , animationPack , null);


may not seem very big, but this replaces the thousands of lines I wrote this week with just 4 lines. Wasted too much time to replicate something that already exists, at least I am glad I found this because the missing part is too complicated to do it manually and the animations are already running very smoothly, hope to be able to show up something very soon once I finish removing all this week's work and replace it by a few more lines of code. At least this made me very happy this weekend so I can work more on the physics portion.

Summer is blazing hot this year and to make the heat even higher some updated pics

Just a few snaps of the editor, the Mystic Framework will power Elem3ntz! game animations, and so far it is working extremelly well, with bones, vertex animation, cloth simulator and other small tricks under the hood.

Mystic Editor

A snap of the work in progress 2D editor, not just simple bones can be added but way more things that I will show up later in a video once I finish the saving/loading code, which will take a few more days to finish. And after that, add the fluid livelike 2d animations into Elem3ntz! game.

This is the wireframe view, basically it works like a 3D tool but designed with specific tools for 2D and each parameter can be independently animated, something I couldn't find in any free solution which is a must for very complex animations. Also includes a 2d scene animator editor for very much complex animation clips.

Animation Composer development

I am quite exited now, made a lot of progress in the past few weeks and seems that the skeleton of the framework is somehow working now, still many things to add but I can show small peek.

Somehow it is becoming easier and easier now to understand where is it going, at least I can do some minor facial animation now with complete control of the textures and deformations, still working in a better time line display since I couldn't find anything that could fit the editor. Will post a video later when I have a complete animation rigged and animated, still is quite difficult at this moment since the preview is not running in real time due to the WPF udates that makes it run slower than 60 FPS, but without it it runs smoothly.