Well everything is finished and uploaded and yay and woo. Downloads aren't online yet and will stay down until such time as an external mirror comes up so that we don't just run our server into the ground as has been done before.

Spent frigging ages tonight with Kizza trying to get his awesome windmill working in his map - turns out rotating movers is something that unreal just really hates. So instead, the windmill is static for this release. Boo, hiss, meh.

Looks as though I accidentally deleted a couple of these posts with a database backup, im pretty sure all they were was me saying 'fixed some bugs here now i will list them'. Nothing you really couldn't miss.

I've spent the last week on and off going over the last few things that needed to be done to get the core of the mod in a finished and working state.
Today Michael and I got together and combined our efforts, and touched up some of the more 'topional extra' things and stuck those in.

I've fixed all of the important bugs. That's right, all of them. Replication on spawn effects, rope slipping in 2D games, awful memory leaks that made the game progressively slow down and roll/crouch combo bugs are all a thing of the past.

The both of us then added in all the flair such as loading screens, gametype screenshots etc. The mod is done.

Oh, the other cool thing I added was an alternate skin system for the ropes which allows new designs to be added in very easily. At the moment we have standard brown rope, steel cable and vine variants. These are extremely easy to use from the point of view of the map editor.

Got a suggestion from a fan today re. teleport effects which I have now implemented.

Basically, I've changed the effect so that on 2D maps, teleporting and spawning are both accompanied by a bright pink beam that shoots up from your player's head into the sky. This makes it much easier to locate your player, especially on fixed camera 2D maps where the view is zoomed out a long way.

This beam only shows up for the player who teleported, so it cannot be used as a position giveaway by other players.

Michael and I got together again today to finish up the last of the bugs. All the weapons are 100% working now, although the weasel's AI still needs some tuning.

I also added in a credits page to the main menu. It's empty at the moment, but I'll get around to it.

Today was a big day for the mod in terms of publicity. I finished adding in some more animations, sounds and most importantly character models to the mod.

Now that all the characters we plan to create are implemented, it is time for us to pass the baton on to the community. The character creation tutorial has officially been started, being publicised at the following locations:

BeyondUnreal Forums
Atari Community
Planet Unreal
Beyond Unreal

Now I guess we can just sit back and wait for some awesome models to roll our way.

Spent the last few hours testing some multiplayer action and fixing up all the bugs it bought forward. Here's a list:

- Changed 'crouch' in menus to 'roll/crouch'
- Players colliding while rolling now bounce properly
- Air instability only happens with other players, or when hitting a wall with sufficient power and at the right angle
- View never gets stuck when rolling now
- Made pickups slower and easier to get
- Network clients can now pickup weapons after losing all their ammo on an old one
- HUD bug with icon not disappearing when weapon does fixed
- Rope velocity not replicating resulting in sliding for clients fixed
- Kills are now awarded when players push someone, they fall, then roll, then fall and die (FIDS)

Spent some time today playing with our first map and trying to make it more playable and less, well, crap.

It's moved on from a test map to something that I think we can be proud of and hopefully release along with the mod.

Also added in the full animation set for the shield. Bam.

Today's race for work manages to see me now almost finished with my work on the project. The only things remaining to do are maps, which Chris will be principally handling, and the code for the puck, weasel and bots which Michael will be doing. So I'm almost done.

I spent a long time adding in solid new features like pickup pictures to the game options screen and pickups to the level query string. So now players will be able to see what pickups are active before joining a match. Neat, eh?

I then spent an equally long time polishing the smaller details of the mod. I put in about half the sounds Liam has sent me, added in some more animations from Kieran.
Then there were other details like fixing the overexposed colouring on characters, fixing the shading on the net pickup, changing the falling and drowning death messages to read 'FIDS!' and stuff like that.

The other important thing I did was changed the mine to how we initially envisioned it. Now it doesn't go off straight away, instead it beeps loudly and uncloaks. The player is pretty much screwed after this, but it's funny to see. If they stand off the mine, it will explode and kill them then.

Today we worked from around 10 in the morning and I'm about ready to stop now.

For the first hours of the day we did a major go-over and bugfix on all our leftover network bugs. I personally fixed up the net animation and firing problems, weasel graphics and shield blocking of projectiles.

A long-dormant bug where players would be able to keep bouncing into each other has been significantly reduced and should now happen only very, very rarely. I also fixed up the lighting on characters so that their textures have more definition now.

Rolling is now fully implemented along with animations. I've also added 'stable' and 'unstable' midair animations so that players have a good visual cue for determining what will happen when they land (stable = land squarely, unstable = roll).

However, the major part of the night for me was implementing our HUD, which I am now quite pleased with. We've tried to keep it as clean as possible, and so it consists only of an indicator to show the currently active weapon. This is all 3D and spinny because I know it looks much cooler that way.

I've posted a shot of the HUD and a character in the midst of rolling, here.

Getting into the final stint of work on our first beta.

Tonight's effort was rolling. I believe I'm about finished with it now, pretty much all the subtleties of it are working perfectly which is just great. Animations aren't done yet but I can tell it's going to look awesome.

The player's avatar doesnt rotate when rolling, which makes things much like in MDuel1. I've also stopped it rotating when crouched for the same reason. Purely aesthetic but nice to look at.

One of the interesting problems that came up with rolling was the ability to get stuck really easily. Since you can't move when crouched and normally can't roll from a crouching position, it was easy to roll under low-hanging objects and get stuck. So of course now players can roll more than once if theyre unable to get up. This could make some interesting maps, as rolling is a slight bit faster than running.

I also added in another nice visual cue to show instability in the air. When you first jump you will look in control, but as soon as another object is bumped into the player starts looking a little spastic. This is a nice cue for knowing what is going to happen to you when you land, as an unstable player will roll upon landing.

The other problem rolling brought in was with the placeable weapons like mine and puck. Since these auto-crouch when fired, they would force the player to roll which wasn't what I was really after. This is fixed now.

Also fixed up some bugs in the 2D player classes and modified the jumping back to normal 'straight up and down' style because testers were finding it difficult.

With the semester drawing to a close, it's getting around to the time where we're going to have to start work on the mod again.

Allow me to be the first to break this long period of delay with some new models for the other heads of the original Marshmallow Duel characters:



We're also planning on starting our MDuel character creation competition very soon. I'm currently patching up the development tutorial and getting hold of all the resources I need to compile a dev kit. When it's ready, full details will be announced on the main page.

Over the last 48 or so hours I've spent my time getting the more difficult animations, like rope climbing and the net 'curled into a ball' animation, ingame.

Weapon animations for the gun, magnet firing loop, grenade throw, boomerang throw and catch, grapple throw and catch, and the placing animations for all placed weapons are working fine and attached to their respective weapons with no problems.

I also fixed some earlier problems with the blank weapon wrecking up some animations and the placeable weapons not forcing you to crouch (an oversight only really).

The rope animations are particularly cool as they are played depending on the speed of climbing. So climbing up very fast produces a faster animation that slow climbing and makes it generally look much nicer.

The net animation was particularly difficult to do as clients werent fond of playing the animation at all. I ended up replicating a variable for it and telling the clients explicitly whether they should be playing it or not.

I just finished the first version of my awesome system to allow weapons to control third person pawn animations.

By default, UT doesnt allow this sort of behaviour, so adding it in makes things much more fantastic in terms of the whole 3rd person experience.

Each weapon is free to replace as many or few of the default animations for the characters as needed. So for example, the shield may need to include new runcycles, crouching cycles etc to look nice. The animation system Ive done today allows this extremely easily by simply changing default properties on each weapon.

Ive put a new build online with Kieran's animations included and set to work with the respective weapons that they are meant for. The gun in particular looks extremely awesome.

The other major thing I did today was modify the rope code somewhat to give greater freedom with them. From now on, players will not touch ropes at all unless they tap their jump or crouch button whilst near them. This is particularly relevant in 2D where players getting knocked at ropes would catch them automatically before. Now some skill is required to not end up FIDs.

Other fixes today:
- Smash platforms now default to 60sec hidden instead of 20.
- Fixed array out of bounds in pickup spawner when game is played with no pickups active.

Fixed cameras are now completely working for the 2D gametype, and look just awesome. The process of adding them to maps if desired is extremely easy and intuitive for the mapper.

Basically, all they need to do is position their viewport camera in the right place for where they want to view the map from ingame. Then it is a simple matter of placing a fixedCamera2D actor in the same place and rotation, and the code handles the rest.

One of the best features of this system is that the camera can be placed in any position or rotation, meaning that the mapper can choose to view their map from cool perspective views as well as straight on 2D.

I also had a big spree of fixing all the little bugs we had left over with different weapons. Here they are:

- puck doesnt bounce out of screen in 2D
- grapple dies if it hits a volume
- magnet fixed for client/server
- net works properly
- added acceleration dampner to pickupBases
- fixed projectile rotation for mine, hook, puck and net
- projectile meshes for boomerang and hook added
- parachut visibility problems fixed
- magnet fx now disappear if the pickup being pulled times out and dies
- Dunce Cap made, and fixed character head - position slightly to fit

In the ingame images section you can see some nice pictures of the new magnet weapon, which I am starting to think is the coolest addition we have made to mduel.

The functionality of the magnet was mostly done by Michael, but to summarise, it basically draws in a pickup you are pointing it at or steals one from another player. The trick is that it also draws in all the pickups around the player very slowly, so you have to be careful not to draw in something nasty.

The magnet FX and weapon attachment were both completed by myself and I am very happy with the way they are both looking. I also spent a lot of time creating effects for the pickups to play when being pulled by the magnet which look really cool, especially since they are scaled by the magnet's influence over them.

Pickup bases have been modified to decelerate when over their maximum speed - this prevents the magnet from filling the level with pickups whizzing to fast to catch.

I fixed up various bugs with the map entities, basically the pickup spawners no longer have issues with rotation and also face in the proper direction.

If you are pushed by someone and then touch a rope, they will no longer get the credit for killing you if you fall from said rope into the marshmallows without touching the ground first.

Oh! I also did some work on the net and managed to get it working pretty well. It holds players in place until they are pushed and works perfectly if they are on the ground. If hit in the air, there are still some client/server issues to work out - the player will keep moving serverside but freeze on the clients, which is of course not very good.

This was a bit of an afterthought so I'm just going to make another post.

I just this minute made a long-overdue update to the website that allows team members to add comments to the images they post which will show up to outside visitors when they view each image.

Hopefully now we can have a bit more explanation on each shot that really gives the full impact.

Ok so my contribution over the last 48 hours was mainly the new character model with a classic style.
I was working again in a very polygonal and geometric style, using Chris' early concept sketches. The final model is ingame now, although the textures are not yet completed. The shot shown here is using a rough texture to give the basic idea.



This model will of course be colour configurable later on.

I also redid the UV maps for the weasel since Chris was having a lot of trouble with the old ones. There was all sorts of horrible overlapping seams etc present, I think I must have been in a hurry when I did it the first time around.

As for weapon stuff, the shield is all coded and works pretty well. There's still odd bugs where projectiles clip through occaisonally, but I hope to have that fixed soon. I'm pretty proud of my netcode for the shield as it works as a separate entity from the player, but has no movement jitter on clients as normally happens with that sort of thing.

I delved into getting all the finished pickup models ingame and wrote some nifty attachment code to handle unique things like the parachute's attachment to the players chest (instead of hands as is the norm). The grenade, mine, puck, net, shield and parachute are all now graphically final and feature the correct models. The gun also has an attachment now but still needs a firing animation.

So that's basically what I've got done on the weekend. There are still quite a few outstanding bugs with those weapons which I hope to squash pretty soon. After that I can get optional fixed cameras working for the 2D game mode and focus on more low-level stuff like getting pickups to appear in the level info string so that anyone joining a game can see what's included.

So it seems that the nasty big memory leak bug we were having was due to my stupid respawn effect.

It used to rip shaders off your body and place them in materialSequences to gradually eliminate seemingly random chunks of texture - an effect that looked a bit like a pixel wipe. But it wasn't very good.

So basically I got rid of that whole bunch of uselessness and instead made a much cooler deres effect. This one uses some very nice vector maths and coordinate translation to detach all staticMesh body parts from your body in the exact same place as they were before being detached. It then spawns some cool red particles all over the body parts and disappears them. I'll probably end up changing the effect again at some point, but the main feature this style has is that it doesn't hog memory and wreck up the game.

For maybe the first time since we started this project, I'm sitting around feeling like there's nothing much for me to be doing. All the big bugs have been squashed and all the weapons I was responsible for are implemented and working perfectly reasonably.

I might get into an attempt at randomly generating levels later on but it seems like too much of a big thing to work on at the moment. I suppose I could start making character models, but I hate modelling a lot these days.

Screenshots have been piling up a bit over the last few days, so here's some pretty pics of the hook and respawn effects in action..



Oh, I also went ahead and imported all my models into the game, ready for the textures they will be getting tomorrow. I animated the weasel nicely but the lightwave->unreal exporter I'm using didn't like it so he just wiggles in a silly way at the moment. Looks hilarious. Might even keep it in.

I had another day of implementing weapons and getting all their FX as close to completion as I can without having access to finished staticMesh objects.

The boomerang was patched up a bit and now works in 2D gamemodes, allowing you to throw it up and down as well as out in front of you.

The grappling hook is finished as well and looks really good. It has a wavy rope that arcs out behind it until it hits something, after which the rope becomes taught and you are dragged towards it.

The 'chut is also finished and working fine. It doesn't look like anything yet though since the parachute itself isnt textured ingame yet.

I also went over the code for the destroyable platforms and changed it a bit to facilitate platforms interaction with projectile weaponry. Weapons such as the mine and grappling hook are much more realistic now as they actually land on the platforms, and fall down from them if they are destroyed.

Michael and I had a big coding session today, working at getting a more stable codebase for the pickups down and then making lots more of them.

The boot is now ingame and works really well - it gives a speed increase when equipped and makes huge jumps when fired.
The 1000V also features a speed increase, much less noticeable than the boot however. This is simply to make it harder to evade, as there are really no edges to make things difficult in a 3D environment.

Pickups have been modified to die out at random intervals, a very important element as when playing with skulls, TNT or anything else undesireable, the map just ends up filling with them if they don't die out after a bit. There is a game option to scale the average lifetime of pickups as well.

The boomerang is ingame and I am extremely happy with the way it is working right now. You have a certain degree of control over it when in the air, so you can steer it towards your opponent. It then returns to you if it has hit a wall or player.

The warp dynamically builds a list of all possible bot navigation points in the level and uses those as spawn targets, so it can never spawn you in stupid places unless the mapmaker things it would be funny to do so.

The mine is also looking pretty great. This was mostly Michael's work but I had a little to do with it at the end. You even crouch when placing it.
Having the mine done is fantastic, as it lays the foundation for how all the other projectile based pickups will work, such as grenade, puck and even weasel.

Today was a good day. I got rope climbing working very well. There is even now animation helping code so that the player always faces the rope whilst climbing on it. Nifty!

Getting the ropes to work properly turned out to be a huge piece of work. It turned out after all the torment and anguish that the problem was in-engine. Apparently if you change the collision size of an object, its drawScale reverts to default (?!). So a quick replication fix from server to client was needed to rectify that inadequacy.

I did up some models for all the 'classic' ingame objects, such as platforms, pickup spawners and all that jazz. Chris added some quick textures which look quite wonderful already.

Erm, what else? Fixed up the TNT so that it always destroys what it hits (there was a problem before with really large platforms - their registration points were outside the TNT blast radius and they would not die if hit near the edge). Fixed up the invisibility a bit so that the server and client can never get out of sync with it.

Here's a nice picture of the platforms and rope object all together. It's starting to look like Marshmallow Duel now.

I spent so many damned hours today trying to fix the simplest bug. For some reason, when you start a new 2D game with no pickups AFTER starting one without, it simply ignores your decision and spawns the last pickup set. Very strange.

Anyway I couldnt find any reason for it at all, so in the end I just did an ugly hack and made a flag to set against that sort of thing. It makes me feel dirty, but it works.

Also made weapons destroy themselves and replace with the blank mduel weapon dummy when out of ammo - this prevents things like the gun's view restriction staying in place after you have exhausted it.

There's also a major memork leak somewhere in the mod that I've been unsuccessfully trying to track down. It seems to afflict the 2D gametypes much more severely. Something isn't being properly destroyed when you die - every time your character respawns it costs you around 5 or 10 fps. I'm hoping to track this down and have it fixed before I put a new mod build online.

So, it took about 10 or 15 hours to make rope cimbing work like it's supposed to in 2D games.

The major problem was making objects think they're colliding when in fact they aren't. If you think about sidescrolling games, you have ladders that sort of sit in the background. You can walk straight through them if you feel like it, or you can stop and climb them. So I needed my mduel climbing ropes to let players pass through them most of the time, but climb up at certain times.

I spent hours upon hours after I had the initial collision working (not something a 3D engine is good at doing) tweaking the feel of the connection and difficulty of the climb to try and get something nice working.

As it stands now, I'm pretty happy. If you're walking along the ground, you can walk straight through a rope as if it isn't there. If you want to climb one, you press and hold your jump key to glide up it gracefully (there's no animation yet, of course). Jumping into a rope comes with a certain degree of 'stickiness' to make it easier to catch them. They're fairly thin, after all. If you jump into a rope and let go of all your keys, youll stick to it perfectly and can then use jump/duck to move up/down it. If you need to jump but aren't interested in the rope, just keep holding forwards and youll kick right through it. You can also use them to get extra boosts of height if you hold jump AND forward whilst moving through them. Overall, very awesome little inventions.

They're easy to use for mapmakers too. You can just drop them in like any other actor, scaling them both horizontally (but why would you) and vertically as needed. They need to be of roughly equal width and length to work effectively, but any height is fine. You can even use custom staticMeshes as ladders, but you need to enter the width and height of the mesh manually or they won't work very well.

I spent another few hours going back over the 2D player class to implement all the stuff I'd done for the 3D games with regards to ladders. 2D feels very nice now, you can slide up and down the ladders between platforms without much trouble at all. There were also a few visual bugs in the crosshair and related stuff hanging around the 2D arena, which I managed to fix up.

I did probably too much work today. Spent this morning playing with collision and trying to make an object that you can walk through, but also climb up. I've gotten pretty close, but I suspect the engine won't allow this sort of thing so I might have to stop trying and be happy with ropes that you just touch to climb up.

I also finally got around to fixing up the telefragging problem we were having much earlier on. Since player/player collision is turned off for some things to allow players to, say, trip through each other, turning it back on again could sometimes end up with people inside each other and one person getting randomly killed. This is now fixed, instead players just get bounced like normal. Oh, I also added a tiny bit of air control, because I think the game probably needs it.

I then moved on to weapons because I was sick of all that. I fixed up a lot of base class code that is needed to make things work like being unable to fire unless standing (or in the air for some other weapons).

The weapons that I've finished are the 1000V, invisibility, gun, TNT and skull. Invisibility was probably the hardest to coordinate between client and server, but it works fine now. I made pretty FX for the 1000V pickup, and also went ahead and made some other cool rez and derez effects for the floating pickups themselves. The TNT has a cool explosion when it blows up ground too. I think thats all. Oh wait, the gun is awesome because you can't aim up or down. That required far too much effort. But well worth it.

Here's a picture of some FX. And a new build of the mod with all this stuff in it is now online.

Michael and I went over a lot of stuff today, and I believe now that I have finished fixing all the small problems with the game up to this point.

We also started creating code for the weapons - the skull and TNT now work entirely properly and more weapons are coming soon.

Here's a list of everything I can remember fixing, because it would once again be too much effort to talk indepth about each thing:

Keybinds are cleaned up and don't show useless buttons anymore.

Players in 2D games have been fixed so that they have a mesh now.

Bots now have a mesh, which is inherited from the server player's current character configuration.

Pickup bases are properly removed.

Added game option to choose whether platforms respawn or not.

Added pickup sets to quickly choose none, shareware, registered or all.

Added pickup multiplier so that the number of pickups generated can be customised.

I also played with gamespeed and gravity a bit to try and get rid of the 'floaty' feel of the jumping in UT. Nothing seemed to particularly work though and it all felt a bit wierd. Perhaps we will end up just leaving it alone.

This morning I quickly fixed up a couple more things.

I made a huge improvement in the netcode for the pickups. They use only about half the bandwith they were using before now. Basically I've made it so they never try to tell each other about their rotation properties, since its irrelevant to the gameplay and just looks cool.

Also added some stuff to the platforms so that they can now be told to never respawn. It might be an idea to add in a game option to force all platforms to never respawn, actually. Just an idea.

Today has been really good to me in the form of getting those niggling little things working that have been plaguing me for months.

So here's a list:

- Pickups no longer bounce off platforms, they clip straight through like in mduel.
- Pickups bounce off level killzones (ie marshmallow) instead of dying.
- Players all appear perfectly to all other players without delay.
- Platforms now destroy and appear properly for all clients. This includes starting off invisible if a player joins midgame when they are dead.
- Platforms now explode in a cool way instead of from a point, so that elongated platform meshes will explode nicely.
- Added platform appear and disappear sounds.

Its certainly a big update, so a new build is now online for team members to use.

Dont mind the title, it's a running joke that nobody gets.

Today I got some good work in on the destructible platforms code. I've created platform objects that map makers can assign any mesh and scale to and simply place in their maps in the same way as staticMeshes. The amount of time for each platform to wait until respawning is also configurable by the mapmaker. They even get lit properly!

So far it all looks great - I've added in some awesome particle effects that are only temporary but still work pretty well. Here's a timelapse picture of the whole process (respawn time was very low for testing because waiting is tedious).

Replication for this is a slight bit difficult, since the visibility of objects is never passed across by the engine unless you tell it to. At the moment, the server is fine but the clients still see the platforms even when they're supposed to be invisible. Nothing I can't fix up when I next get the time to though.

The character system now works and replicates stuff between clients all very nicely.
The only thing it doesnt do 100% is working for listenservers - characters inherit the server's style for the first spawn, but then after dying everything is fine, so it isn't that much of a problem.

Anyway, this means that the character design system is going ahead, and we can start encouraging others to start making their own stuff. Oh, and we can do it too.

I've moved all the code for handling player limb selection into the mod's PlayerReplicationInfo now, so that it is constantly visible to the server and all clients throughout a match.

I've also reworked the method of storing said data so that it uses static arrays and variables instead of dynamic arrays, which we all now know don't replicate properly, if at all.

Point to all this being -it's all ready to test online and that another day or so of work with 2 computers to test with should yield successful results; and people can get started on making custom characters.

Michael and I had a bit of a go-over of all the code today and got a lot of small bugs sorted out.

Replication of the player's colour works fine for clients only, now. If youre playing on a listenserver theres still problems for some reason.

A few things need to be reworked to get everything working online.. replicated player selection variables need to be moved from pawn over to playerReplicationInfo for one (you CANT have global stuff in pawn, because it gets destroyed when you die and everything goes back to defaults).

Also need to completely rewrite the player selection arrays. Since dynamic arrays (the cool way im using now) arent replicated properly, its going to have to be done with boring old static array stuff to replicate alright.

I've spent the last couple of days fixing up small bugs in the character creation system and writing a HUGE tutorial (about 20 pages I think) on character creation for MD:MR.

The plan is to get some animation students to check over it and make sure its informative enough, then release it out to the general UT public so that anyone who's interested can start making cool stuff for the mod when it's released.

When it all gets vitoed we'll have it online for interested modellers to do stuff with (no animation is required, yey!).

Here's a fun function:
 

static function Array<Material> FindStaticMeshSkins(StaticMesh aMesh)

{

    local int iPointer, i, iCutOff;

    local string sParseString, sTextureClass, MaterialsPropText;

    local array<Material> SkinArray;

    //local class<object> sClassPlaceholder;


    MaterialsPropText = aMesh.GetPropertyText("Materials");


    // This is the max number of iterations currently allowed for this loop. (to avoid an unlikely infinite recursion)

    iCutOff = 128;


    i = 0;


    for (iPointer = InStr(MaterialsPropText, ",Material="); iPointer != -1 && i < iCutOff; iPointer = InStr(MaterialsPropText, ",Material="))

    {

        sParseString = Mid(MaterialsPropText, iPointer + 10);

        iPointer = InStr(sParseString, "'");

        sTextureClass = Left(sParseString, iPointer);


        //sClassPlaceholder = class<object>(DynamicLoadObject(sTextureClass, class'Class'));

        //SetPropertyText("sClassPlaceholder", sTextureClass);


        sParseString = Mid(MaterialsPropText, iPointer + 1);

        iPointer = InStr(sParseString, "'");

        sParseString = Mid(sParseString, iPointer + 1);

        iPointer = InStr(sParseString, "'");


        // Cut off the parsed section of MaterialsPropText so that it will go onto the next section during the next iteration. (otherwise infinite recursion)

        MaterialsPropText = Mid(sParseString, iPointer + 1);

        sParseString = Left(sParseString, iPointer);


        SkinArray[i] = Material(DynamicLoadObject(sParseString, Class'Material'));


        i++;

    }


    Return SkinArray;

}

 
What it DOES is to work out what materials are being used on a StaticMesh. The engine doesn't support doing that by default. The code is based on work by shambler, and because of it I've now got a working player custom colours system happening.



Today I also started working on making all your limbs fall apart in random directions when you die, because I thought it would be a cool use of karma physics. So far everything is ok, except that the damn things won't collide with anything. Having them fall straight through the ground isn't that spectacular, so I might work more on it later or just get rid of the effect. It's not that essential.

Yesterday I got the geometry of a proper character model from Michael Lane.

So, I've converted the model into static objects for use in Marshmallow Duel:MR. He looks pretty awesome ingame, the style seems to fit alright even if he isn't quite an MDuel character. Anyway I've had a test with him and here's some screenshots of different parts of him working with the other test objects. Its all only temporary.. the robot might make it into the final game, he might not. We'll see.

Ok well the main thing of news for today is the character designer, I've redone it much cooler and made a proper interface for it so that it isn't horrendously dodgy and difficult to use.

Here's a pic. This is probably going to be the final design for it, or something similar anyway.

Also today I added in some stuff thanks to player input from body check. The game now comes with a choice between a high and low detail crosshair, in case the high detail one slows down your computer too much. I fiddled with the high detail one as well to make it less angry for framerate. An 8fps decrease due to crosshair seemed a bit ridiculous.
I also added a camera offset option, so that players can position their camera to the left and right of their player. This is completely configurable and good news for the people who were pissed off about not being able to see things directly in front of them.

Ok so I've got things moving along pretty well now, players can select body parts independently of each other to combine into their own horrendous character creations.

Some problems are sure to come up with replicating the data to clients and all that stuff, but for now I'm happy to have this much done so I'm just going to temporarily ignore it. I'm going to be talking to some 3D artists on the weekend, and hopefully they will be interested enough in what I have done so far to start making some custom dueler pieces.

The GUI to set all this up is really dodgy at the moment, but here's a screenshot anyway since it shows the level of customisation I am talking about:



Here is the result of this character selection ingame. I apologise deeply for the horrendous modelling and texturing, but at this stage I am more about getting function down rather than form. Let the 3D artists worry about that.



I should also mention that the character colouring system I was hoping on will have to be a no-go for the moment. Obtaining a reference to the textures used on a staticMesh is next to impossible.

I've made some good progress on the character design menu. Basically, at this stage it is fully capable of reading and writing all the data necessary for players to select custom body parts for their characters.

Of very awesome and important news is the fact that I am using the game's INT system to load in character set data dynamically. This means that third party modellers can create their own body sets and import them straight into the game - nothing has to be hardcoded into the mod itself.

Basically, I see this process as going like follows:
1. Modeler makes their own player torso and custom animations if they want. This is then set up with a defined skeleton with specific bone names.
2. Modeler makes custom limb objects. These are simple staticMeshes, and can be a full limb set or some subset of that, so for example releasing a body set that only adds a new head is quite fine.
3. Modeler fills out a simple class file of the following template:
 

class whatever extends duelerInfo;


defaultProperties

{

    attachmentActors(0) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(1) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(2) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(3) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(4) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(5) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(6) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(7) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(8) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(9) =StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(10)=StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(11)=StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(12)=StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(13)=StaticMesh''

    attachmentActors(14)=StaticMesh''


    SetName="Cubic Lad"

}

 
Where attachmentActors defines all the staticMesh objects that will be applied to each limb (there is a certain system to this); and SetName is simply the name of this body set to be displayed in menus.

4. Modeler compiles this class to their own *.U package to be distributed along with their animation and staticMesh package. They then create an *.INT file with the following format:
 

[Public]

Object=(Name=myPack.myClass,Class=Class,MetaClass=mduelGame.duelerInfo)

 
This is filled in with the path to the file created in step 3.

Now the game will automatically detect their custom player models and add them into the menus as flawlessly as with the core player models.

Pretty cool, eh?

Today I spent a long, long time making sure that absolutely everything I've done so far works correctly. It didnt. But it does now.

I discovered the horrors of native replication - basically, we can't use a subclass of 'pickup' for our moving pickups, since the pickups has native replication that ignores all its movement data. Obviously, epic thought pickups would never need to move. Not to worry, my new pickup class does the job just fine.

Also added in some things I've been meaning to do for ages.. You now spawn with a blank weapon which does nothing - not only does this stop bots generating runtime warnings, it also makes them much more aggressive since they think they have a melee weapon in their hand. Finally, they are using some sort of extremely limited 'push bad guys off the edge' logic. You can also only hold a single weapon at a time now - as soon as you pick up a new pickup, whatever is in your hand will evaporate. yey. Oh and jump height is increased slightly, since Michael was dubious it was high enough.

New version online in dev files now.

Ok, its done.
Havent tested client/server things yet but that stuff should hopefully be pretty fine.

Anyway the game options menu has all the options in it that are needed, at least I imagine at the moment. They all take effect immediately and seem to work fine. Ive moved most of the options from the 'player' screen over to the 'game' screen, to make room for all the menu stuff we will need to let people build their characters limb by limb.

Motion blur is optional, camera smoothing is scalable, character transparency is toggleable. The crosshair is finished and its colour and size can be customised. It also toggles off and on. It looks pretty cool, especially when you move it fast - you get a nice blurred line from it as it smudges across the screen.

Im pretty happy with the colour slider for the crosshair. It takes only a single slider to do things - using hue instead of separate sliders for red, green and blue. Here's the fun code to convert from a single hue value to RGB values for rendering fun:
 

function color hsl2rgb(float hue)

{

 local float red, green, blue, saturation, light;

 local float tmpred, tmpgreen, tmpblue;

 local float tmp1, tmp2;

 local color retv;


 hue /= 256.0;

 saturation = 1.0;

 light = 0.5;


  tmp2 = (light + saturation) - (light * saturation);


  tmp1 = 2 * light - tmp2;

  tmpred = hue + 1.0 / 3.0;


  if(tmpred > 1)

   tmpred -= 1;


  tmpgreen = hue;

  tmpblue = hue - 1.0 / 3.0;


  if(tmpblue < 0)

   tmpblue += 1;


  /* red */

  if(tmpred < 1.0 / 6.0)

   red = tmp1 + (tmp2 - tmp1) * 6.0 * tmpred;

  else if(tmpred < 0.5)

   red = tmp2;

  else if(tmpred < 2.0 / 3.0)

   red = tmp1 + (tmp2 - tmp1) * ((2.0 / 3.0) - tmpred) * 6.0;

  else

   red = tmp1;


  /* green */

  if(tmpgreen < 1.0 / 6.0)

   green = tmp1 + (tmp2 - tmp1) * 6.0 * tmpgreen;

  else if(tmpgreen < 0.5)

   green = tmp2;

  else if(tmpgreen < 2.0 / 3.0)

   green = tmp1 + (tmp2 - tmp1) * ((2.0 / 3.0) - tmpgreen) * 6.0;

  else

   green = tmp1;


  /* blue */

  if(tmpblue < 1.0 / 6.0)

   blue = tmp1 + (tmp2 - tmp1) * 6.0 * tmpblue;

  else if(tmpblue < 0.5)

   blue = tmp2;

  else if(tmpblue < 2.0 / 3.0)

   blue = tmp1 + (tmp2 - tmp1) * ((2.0 / 3.0) - tmpblue) * 6.0;

  else

   blue = tmp1;


 retv.R = red * 255;

 retv.G = green * 255;

 retv.B = blue * 255