Polish – Phase One

Spurring on from the clash particles, the game has received numerous enhancements and fixes.

Fix – Accidental Deaths

Up until now, the player’s limbs would detect the collision of any sword and take damage. This lead to an incredibly restrictive scope for player attacks as I had to worry about the sword tapping the player’s own body.

Now, the limbs will detect if the sword it got hit with is the sword that the character is holding, if so, the collision will be ignored.

Polish – Level Enhancements

Geometry

I have removed the hole in the North wall of the map and added a bit more geometry in the walls to play with the lighting. I tinkered with the idea of adding a roof to the structure but decided against it as it compromised player visibility.

Lighting

Lighting has received a minor overhaul, mostly on the GI side of things. I bumped up the indirect intensity of the directional light and the reflection capture, while reducing the skybox lighting intensity.

I have also added a series of light probes around the map so the player character models and swords can receive indirect lighting data, the result is a presentation that is a little more refined.

Polish – Sword

Hitboxes

The sword now has a larger hitbox coming out of the blade, allowing the player to hit their target slightly easier. While it may not be as “realistic” as the old box, I believe the easier hits make the fights more fun.

Collisions With Other Swords

Previously, in a collision between swords, only the current velocity of the swords themselves were taken into the equation. This meant that if a moving sword collided with one that wasn’t moving, only the moving sword reacted to the collision.

Now, in addition to the sword’s own velocity, the velocity of the other sword is taken into account. The result are collisions that are much more realistic and reliable, and a little less bouncy.

The problem is, I now have to balance between sword collision reliability and the bounciness of each collision. This could also be tackled with further updating the game’s tick rate (which would have a noticeable impact on game performance) or further increasing the size of the sword colliders, but I fear this may make the sword’s range so big that the player will unexpectedly hit things.

Polish – Player Controller

Attacks

Player attacks now deal extra damage depending on the velocity of the sword on impact with a limb.

Health

With attacks now having multiplied damage, I have lowered the base damage received from an attack as players were beginning to die too quickly. And I have converted health from an integer to a floating point value.

Misc

• The eye material has had its roughness value lowered and a slight emission applied to it to make it glint while keeping the whites white.
• Removed all the legacy variables from the physics-based attacks.
• Removed some unnecessary mehtods from the playerHealth script.