As of 9:30AM, it looks like I have just shy of a month until I go back to work. And by “just shy” I mean the nine hours it’s been since 6AM today. That translates to 19 working days and a few weekends.
And since I’m no longer taking anywhere near as much Vicodin as I was a few weeks ago, I’m pretty functional as long as it doesn’t involve much walking. If it wasn’t for this gorram wound-vac and the necessity of wearing the weird open-toed shoe, I’d be going back to work in two weeks.
You know what that means.
I have roughly four weeks to apply to projects.
I have my class backlog, with the advantage that since I’ll be taking them at home I can pay better attention to them and do the coursework as I’m doing the lectures instead of listening to them at work (with tons of interruptions). And since I can do the coursework as I go, I can afford to do some that isn’t directly related to a big Devil Monkey product. Which includes the projects in said classes. One of them includes four projects. I’ve done two of them, more or less.
One of these classes has five projects attached to it. One I’m skipping outright; it’s a very basic intro to the Unity engine and C# coding in general. If you’ve been paying any attention at all over at Devil Monkey Games, you know this is well below my pay grade.
The second I turned into Projet Rokkit. Aside from mine having prettier assets and the car batteries, it’s pretty much identical to the class project. I’ll probably go back into it and expand upon it some more. Its engine is sound, and I can see a lot of potential for other games based on it. Arcades were full of them when I was a kid, and the NES had one that I still play on occasion.
Project three is a rail shooter. Think Space Harrier, Star Fox, and games like that. If I make a few changes and turn the spaceship into a car, it could be turned into something like Pole Position or Road Blaster.
Then there’s a tower defense game. While the towers themselves are useful, I’m not a big fan of those games. I’ll probably skip it as a project, but I’m definitely going to screw around with the towers themselves. Anyone who has played Half-Life knows exactly what a pain in the anoos a good sentry tower can be.
And then you have the FPS. You think I’ll be continuing to improve on that one? It’s pretty much the Devil Monkey Games project right now.
One improvement was already in the works before I wound up in the hostibule. I’m rewriting the gun code completely. As it works right now, the guns use a straight raycast mechanic. It works pretty well for a basic single-shot weapon, but it has issues when doing shotguns and will be hard to adapt to grenade launchers or more realistic long-range shooting – it can’t handle projectile drop without a lot of work.
So I’m redoing it to treat every projectile as its own object. Fire a gun and it spawns a bullet object that behaves completely independently of the gun and player. Because these bullet objects will be self-managing, I can tweak them to behave differently depending on just what they’re supposed to be. A pistol bullet or shotgun pellet will have relatively low velocity, so it’s going to drop more noticeably at range than a much faster rifle bullet. A laser won’t have gravity turned on, and I can have it run into problems with smoke clouds and similar countermeasures. Launched grenades, mortar rounds, etc. can have extra code built into them to explode on impact.
I’ve already done part of this with my unguided rocket and guided missile code. With those I’ve made basic rockets that fly straight forward, hypervelocity kinetic-kill rockets that fly straight forward at unbelievable speeds, and guided missiles of several speed and endurance profiles. The only thing missing to make an FPS-capable rocket or missile launcher is the launcher itself and basic spawn code to make the launcher spawn the rockets or missiles when the trigger is pulled.
Which, coincidentally, is identical to the code required to make a pistol or rifle fire a bullet in my improved system.
So as of this afternoon, my plan is to work on the 3D modeling classes I’ve been trying to get through for a while now, do the rail shooter project (I have a few ideas about what to do with it), and make improvements to Rokkit and the FPS, including Monkehville.