February 2024

Another month has gone by! Things have been getting busy at my job but I'm still doing my best to chip away at this, slowly but surely, and it's time to force myself to share that progress with you!

I spent most of this month working on the logic to control props. I took the framework of my NPC animation tool and used it to make a much simpler tool to give me that sweet, sweet props control. Here's what it looks like in the editor:

By selecting the character's name and inputting an animation number (0 being the first anim in the sequence), I can see any prop cues related to that animation on that character, as well as create new ones. I just have to specify what prop this character is manipulating, which hand it's going to be held in, as well as whether they're swapping hands or picking up/setting down the prop. Then input a time in seconds, and apply the prop cues to be configured with everything else upon starting the game.

So now, characters are able to pick up props (from ANY distance, which is something I need to be careful with) and set them down in an upright position. I think I'll probably incorporate some sort of snapping system for the props--just like the 'marks' in the NPC Tool--so that I'm not pulling my hair out editing animations down to the centimeter in Blender and making sure characters are setting things down EXACTLY where they need to be. It's all about working smarter, not harder.

Also, while I was working on all this props stuff, I realized that the hands of my character models still look like absolute trash. It took me a while to get it right because hands are.............difficult, to say the least, but it was important to get them looking good before implementing all this props stuff. And if I'm being nitpicky, it's still not perfect, but it's a far cry from what it used to be, so I feel great about that.

Since this month has been so busy at work, I haven't really recorded too many animations with my actors yet. We've only had one session, and it went well, but it was more of a test run than anything else so I don't have too many animations to show for that work yet. Hopefully there will be more on that front in the weeks to come.

I also still need to make one more tool for myself to complement the animation tool and the prop tool. I need some sort of interface for creating, previewing, and applying LIGHT CUES. The framework already exists, but I'm still using some really annoying external software for that and I'd like to move it all into the Godot editor like my other tools. So look forward to an update on that sometime in March!