Devlog# 6 Communicado

Hello there,

So this week has honestly not been extremely productive, still recovering from the pneumonia and my primary job has been busier than usual. But I did get some basics covered.

Synchronized Animations

https://kappa.lol/fnWQe

So this was actually fairly simple, the problem was my own code setup was conflicting with it. The way the player controller is handled involves disabling and enabling the process function which was conflicting with the children of the player node and in turn when I was trying to get the animations to synchronize, they weren’t running because the process function was disabled. This lead to most of a day being spent on trying to figure out how to synchronize animations when I already had the answer, my code was just getting in the way lol

The fun part, by the end of the day, it wasn’t even me who figured this out, it was my friend Tango after roughly 15 minutes, if that, of looking at my code directly. It helps to have someone with a ridiculous amount of experience in programming and the common pitfalls of noobishness I am going through.

Needless to say, players are now synchronized in animations, position and movement direction with each other when loading into the game world.

Communication

https://kappa.lol/1JZRM

With that finally getting out of the way, I decided to focus next on something easier before diving into inventory, the chat system.  This was fairly straight forward, just a series of functions and network calls back and forth to send the message and who’s sending it from the player to the server and the server sending that information back to all players in the game world.  The result was fairly simple, a “World Chat”.

I plan to expand on this later on but I just wanted to get the first iteration of it in place as it seemed and turned out to be fairly simple.  Later on I will add systems like local proximity based chat, private messages and faction chats as the required systems are tied in.  Faction chat will obviously be a ways out as factions are a ways out.

As simple as chat is, it’s really cool to me from a gameplay perspective to put me that much closer to the reimagining of the original Face of Mankind. Just seeing chat working reminds me of the good old days. I plan to of course clean it up, add a chat box with tabs, wrap the text within the box and extend the memorable history of chat, possibly even having chat history exist and show for a player just joining the server, although I’m not sure that fits into my gameplay concept so I may not go in that direction.

Moving forward

With these two simple things in place, it’s slowly making my dream more of a reality.  I think the inventory system recreation will make this feel a lot more real as inventory will lead to crafting which will lead to mining and that will create the basic loop of a player run economy.  This will be followed either by a basic online market system or a combat system first, I haven’t decided as that’s a bit far out for now.

But once all of these systems are in place, I will have recreated the basic circle of FoM life, Mining, Production, Marketing/Trade and Combat/use of all of those materials. Thinking beyond this is a bit wishful thinking at the moment as that’s a lot of ground to cover, but if I had any thought beyond those goals, I think the faction system would be the next move to tie it all together.

Hopefully by then I will have found a solution to getting the world design moving along.

Like I said, not a hugely productive week, but I have pretty straight forward goals ahead of me for the core mechanics.  Now I have had some other thoughts on the direction I want to take this game. As I build it, I carry the nostalgia of Face of Mankind, but I also have the fond experience of the roleplay servers of FiveM GTA.  I have pondered this more or less becoming a “Roleplay Environment” of sorts. Basically providing the mechanics that you would see added in FiveM servers usually by means of the server owners adding scripts they would purchase or develop themselves.

My thought would be to add as many of the basic “Live in this world” style mechanics you would see in a server like that to provide an environment for communities to create their own roleplay and storied experiences within while sharing the core mechanics of FoM.  Now with that said, I don’t know that I ever intend to add vehicles to the world design, vehicles CAN be extensively complex to design, but I won’t lie and say I’m not drawn to seeing a form of police cars in my game as they were a huge part of my enjoyment of the FiveM experience.  So who knows what may happen, would be cool if I could pull it off.

With all of this said, it creates the potential for different styles of environments. While I am creating a sci fi design at the moment, whose to say there couldn’t be various versions of this game down the road with different settings from Sci Fi to Medieval to Fantasy even. The potential for an all around Roleplay Experience game really has no limits. It could even be further expanded if my design allowed for the addition of player created scripts to modify the gameplay of their own servers like FiveM does.  Just some random thoughts.

Final Note

In addition to all of this, I have upgraded Godot from 4.3 stable to the new release of 4.4 stable just to do my best to work with the latest available technology.  I am also pushing version 0.0.18 today live to be available for download which includes all of the latest updates to the game from 3d migration to this week’s mechanic additions. You may also notice I’ve done some sprucing up to the main menu to include some background music and sci-fi theming.

Until next time.