Welcome to Wrestling Gamers United Newsletter #294


1) Fly baby fly!!
2) Fire Dave
3) PWX Uprising pre orders
4) Link of the week
5) Question of the week


1) Fly baby fly!!
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Ten hours.

That's how long it took our crew to perfect flying moves from start to finish. We worked out a balcony move a while back but quickly realized we would have to hack it to make it work until we (wisely) rebuilt the way we handled certain collision situations and basic physics. Now that those things were working the way we wanted to (no thanks to the engine we're using wasn't intended to do these things at all) the flying moves we're working exactly the way we wanted after only ten hours. First we tried to use a single animation that contained all player movement from the time he started the move to the time he landed. That worked, but not well enough. Tim and Bill mainly worked together on it and they decided to split the animation up into three sections, the launch, the flying, and the landing. The engine wasn't going to let us set triggers at these points in a single animation but splitting it up this way worked very well. After a few hours the move (a simple double axe handle to a standing opponent) looked very close to perfect. Some changes needed to be made to the collision distance to keep the attacker from going too far into the opponent but that was fixed quickly. The three part animation executed flawlessly with no perceivable breaks between the sections. The attacker tracks the position of the opponent at the time of launch, travels towards him (to a set maximum distance which will later be made an adjustable variable in caw), and knocks him on his ass if he connects.

The next step was getting the same move to work on an opponent who was outside the ring on the floor. It worked using the same animation but because the distance to the floor was further there was an unacceptable amount of 'floating' that took place for the last few feet of the drop. The quickest way to make it look better was to animate that section of the move with the additional distance. Sadly, this means we won't be easily able to recycle every flying move animation for every situation but at least we only have to animate the flying portion of the move twice and can still recycle the launch and landing animations.

To test our theory that this flying system would work in any situation we revisited our balcony moonsault. It took Tim most of the day to animate it all (he had to animate a turn on the balcony railing so he would face the right way instead of just spin in place before launching) and what do you know? It worked! The animation needs a little work, kinda 'floaty' still, but it works well and that's what matters first.

Good week!



2) Fire Dave
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I suck.

Sardeep has been struggling to tweak the running attacks and I've been giving him the wrong directions for months now. We're using a simple flying body press attack for our main test move as a running attack. For some reason I was thinking it should work as if it were a pinning move and not a strike per se. Check out the move in No Mercy (which lately we've jokingly begun referring to as our design document) and you'll see that the attacker does not land on the opponent. He knocks the opponent down and lands off to the side. I, however, was thinking I was playing Mat Mania and I've been telling Sardeep that the attacker needs to pass through the opponent's position to land on top of him. Sounds minor but those are two TOTALLY different systems for handling running attacks. We sorted it out and now the running attacks are behaving the way they should instead of my dumb ass way of thinking about it.

That being said, I fully intend to go back one day soon and have them add it as a pinning move again so my Dynamite Tommy caw is legit ;-)

As per the web cam idea suggested in the question of the week I think it could be filed under the category of lame. It does nothing towards helping the game get made and all it will do is put a drain on resources. It's going to take webspace/bandwith and it's going to take time to get set up. I don't care if it's only an hour or two, that's an hour or two that could be going into the game.

If you follow Tonzophunn's idea,you should also hire more...feamale developers.I heard they were t3h best these days.And they...are the best...

No,I don't like Heather any more...
Tell her she has to move on,like I did...

I think a better idea will be something like a chat room (in your free time of course) with the crew.A good time to connect the users (and give me,dratsab and vadlik a scene to "ply our "trade"") together and connect the crew to the users,let us ask quick questions,and above all have a good time.I don't think you get any closer to the community than that...