#montanez blogpost gamedev

[simplegames-blog1]

3/30 Blog Post – By Jashua M.

This week, we’re starting to get our combat mechanics worked out. We’re finally at a state where our networking is stable enough to be able to be hosted and joined without a problem. One of us is working on the technical side of the gameplay mechanics, like hit detection, our “tie-breaker” system, input, etc. while I’ll be working on the visual side of the gameplay mechanics, like animations, particles, more weapons, etc. What I worked on this week was our animation system. It’s basically a state machine, like Unity’s, but I like this one a bit better. Basically, I handle the animations by a bunch of bools that represent which “state” of animation you are in, and the machine automatically detects when these bools are being fired or not, and it handles animation transitions. Once those were done on client side, I had to make sure it would replicate for each client in the server. As always, we make an RPC that tells each client that this client is performing an action, in this case it’s an animation. At first I was having issues because on certain clients the animations weren’t firing, and it was because you have to modify the pawn that’s animating for all of the clients. So what this means is, in our own versions of the game, I can’t just say “Hey, I’m playing this animation”. I must tell the server “Hey server, I want this pawn to start animating”, and the server tells everyone else “Hey guys, take this pawn and animate it”. This whole process is weird for me, but that’s how our networking works as of now.