October 2019 W4: Stats and Skills

Oct 28-1 Week 4 Update - Stats and Skills

Of all the weeks, this has I think ended up being the least 'shiny'. It was fundamentally difficult and required some extended visual brainstorming for solutions, and the end results aren't very impressive from a front end perspective. The good news is, this paves the way for an advanced pass over the equipment system, hooking procedurally generated item 'sub-types' such as polearms or swords into the skills system.

Primary Achievement - Stats and Skills

Continuing the long running tradition, The first two gifs I'd like to share directly relate to this week's core feature.
The functional stats UI.
The stats UI is relatively bare bones, but functional. I've already got a short list of quality of life improvements to go in, aside from the eventual design overhaul to make it look better, of course. All the values are hooked into the instantiating character's stats, and will reflect the current values.

It doesn't look like much, certainly, but this UI represents a significant part of this week's effort due to the unforeseen design challenges dealing with the infinite scaling, but uniform sized text I use. This mean that the procedurally (read: code) generated skill lists would usually end up looking rather like this:

A broken UI: Part 1

... Or this:
A broken UI: Part 2
If you don't see what's going on there, the text object expands to take up the whole parent panel, but the text size is constrained to the lowest number in its group. This meant that despite 'Psionics' having heaps of space to expand, it could not because the skills in 'Ranged' were as large as they could possibly get.

This also resulted in the rather grotesque text formatting you see above, which I thankfully resolved.

This second gif requires a little context to make sense. It is showing the functional impact of the athletics skill - that is, you run faster. I ran our friend John around to gain him some XP (At a hyper-increased rate, for testing and display), then ran him alongside Nick to show how his speed has increased from the base speed to a speed modified by his skill.
Run, John, run!

Secondary Achievements

Although these were achieved over the weekend as an extra curricular 'non-programming' activity for learning, they turned out pretty cool and I learned a lot from them, so without further ado:
A basic idle animation!
An updated run animation!
Since the initial run animation was my very first animation experience, I thought it pertinent to try again and learn more of Blender's animation suite. What I learned was that animating is incredibly rewarding, but can be extremely finnicky and frustrating at times due to a mixture of bugs on Blender's behalf, uninformative UI resulting in seemingly random issues, and the very artistic nature of animating, particularly involving the uncanny valley.

Overall, once they were done, I decided that it was an enjoyable and rewarding experience. It also has the added benefit of letting me include shinier things in what otherwise would be a rather overwhelmingly text blog post.

Next week, this work will flow into the aforementioned advanced pass over items and crafting, as well as a move towards beginning the medical system, which is technically scheduled for November week 2, but I will likely at least start it some time in mid-late November week 1.

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