7-28-12 - Soldier Of Progress: Stealth, Tanks, and...?!

 Hey. So, I've still been working on Soldier Of. It's turning out pretty well so far.


One thing I've implemented is stealth - now enemies can and will chase you if they spot you. As you can see in the GIF animations below, they will patrol a certain area randomly, but if you get in their field of view, then they will chase you down, firing when they've got a clear shot. I've toned down their damage since the second GIF, but they're still not to be trifled with.

The next thing of note is that I've been working on the first boss. I thought a tank would be a nice boss to start working on, so I modeled it awhile ago based off of the tank from the GBA and DS series, Advance Wars. It turned out alright, and since then I've textured and rigged it. Hopefully I'll be able to work with it and develop a cool and tense boss fight from it.

I got a little stuck when animating the treads for when it moves forward, as I couldn't quite decide between moving the UV values of the treads' vertices, or manually replacing the mesh every frame it animates. I ended up going with the UV translation method - one thing that I didn't fully know about was that you can't animate the UV values of a vertex with it being transformed by bones from an armature, which is unfortunate. Fortunately, I was able to split the model up into several different pieces, and so bypass that little issue. It turned out well.

Note that the rigid body physics looks nice, but probably won't be implemented in-game since it's not really necessary for the boss...



I've also worked on new maps and areas. I thought that the park didn't really get enough 'play', so I'm planning on expanding it with kind of a dark forest area. I was thinking that it would play into the plot a little bit, where the alien robots are stealing resources from the land and dumping waste, thereby corrupting the forest and causing it to turn dark and poisonous. Kind of a stupid plot idea, but I think it looks nice, so I want to tie it in somehow (the green tree in the back doesn't really fit in, though). Forgive the poor weeping willows, as well - I've yet to find a good way to render them.

Anyway, that's some of the things I've done so far. I should have a video up soon, and another demo release should be coming up soon as well. Thanks for reading and watching my blog here!

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