Development blog
This is our development blog! We have been maintaining this blog with updates for over 1000 days now, starting June 10th, 2013. Here you can read about the work that goes into making a game as complex as Brutal Nature:
2016 January 1st
A new year. Brutal Nature has advanced a lot in the last year. We have gone from version 0.50 to version 0.59 and a lot has been added. Cube editing mode has been added, chunk caches, water physics, swimming. 64bit versions of client and server have been released and several new avatars have been added. A new barter menu and cash have been added.
The accessory programs Smsher for importing models and Rainforge for making new maps have been released.
Animations and such are still being worked on.
2015 December 25th
Found some models but having trouble getting some imported correctly.
Fixed problem with smsher where it wouldn't calculate the bounds correctly for split meshes with animations.
Add ignore animation flag to smsher.
2015 December 18th
So, have somewhat of an acceptable knife/attack animation now. Need to find new weapon models now.
2015 December 11th
More work on animations. Its really hard to get them to feel right.
2015 December 4th
Fixed the problem with cached chunks causing world corruption by increasing the hash to 64bits.
2015 November 27th
More work on animations. Trying to get the gun and arms to align properly to the camera has proven hard. Decided to allow animation overrides to override instead of merge two animations.
It should look much better for 1st person animations as otherwise sway from a walking animation moves the gun around on screen, Ok for normal running, not good for aim down sights mode.
Decided to project the camera position through the head bone of the model. That has greatly helped keeping the gun on the correct spot on screen relative to the arms.
2015 November 20th
Still working on animations. Tried messing around with a few different ways of combining animations.
Settled on combining the bone to bone changes of each animation in global space.
2015 November 13th
Animations are hard. Work continues.
To provide better updates I have decided to change the format of this blog. From now on it will be weekly, updated on Friday.
This way hopefully I can write something more interesting then just what my day to day tasks are, and keep the blog more condensed.
2015 November 12th
Still working on getting overrides of individual animation bones.
2015 November 11th
Still working on animations.
2015 November 10th
More work on animations.
2015 November 9th
Adding additional override systems to animations to make it better for first person views.
2015 November 8th
Second test of merged animations. Running and pistol idle. It sort of worked but it needs a lot of tweaking.
2015 November 7th
First test of merged animations. By combing the legs of running animation and the upper body of swimming animation, I have created: Insane person animation. Won't be used in game but was an interesting test.
2015 November 6th
More work on merging multiple animations.
2015 November 5th
Fixed spider model.
Slowed spider walk/run animation down considerably.
2015 November 4th
Did a full system backup.
Installed MSVC2015.
Converted Brutal Nature to compile under MSVC2015. Must say I am really enjoying the new IDE.
2015 November 3rd
Smsher now exports animations in local instead of global bone space. It also exports bones in a new sorted order.
2015 November 2nd
More work changing how smsher exports models.
2015 November 1st
Started work on changing how smsher exports models.