Improved Subtitles

Another system to replicate is the interaction mechanic. This allows contextual feedback to be delivered to the player through many different outlets, such as interesting objects, items, dialog etc.

I initially already implemented this (see previous blog post here) to a satisfactory standard and it worked for 1/3 of the things mentioned above. The other two were yet to be developed and still are.
This post is a revisitation of the initial mechanic ...object interactions. The other 2 aspects of this mechanic, item pickups are dialog are easy extentions of the mechanic, that can be implemented when needed.

Originally I had simple UI Text object, that was passed on a string that was attached to any given object via a trigger.

This works quite well, it allowed me to attach messages to almost anything. However it wasn't true to the original. Font was wrong, alignments off and even animation.

The above image was taken from the original game, even compared to my first iteration it doesnt really compare.
The video below shows the new subtitles working. They now have a combination of 4 phases; static, automatic and animated. Each of these interactions is showcased below.

While it works much better, it still needs a little tweaking, little things such as font style and type.
The next step is to add item pickups, this is almost entirely the same, just with the addition of a 3D object of the picked up item on screen.

Gameplay: Movement Local vs World

Silent Hill utilises many quirky camera angles throughout to invoke different feelings. trying to replicate this is interesting because movement quite often varies from a world perspective to local axes.
To combat the shift in perpective, I've created a script that I can attach to each and every camera (more precisiely their triggers). This script already grabs one camera from another to allow seemless gameplay. Now they also have an attribute which is set in-editor, this new addition means I can set a camera to either World or Relative. This then passes the information to the player object which then moves based on player input in relation to what type of camera is in use.

So the above script is attached to a cameras trigger box, this then has 2 camera inputs to swap between. It has 2 because while the player is within the trigger 'Cam' is used, when they leave 'Main Cam' is then resumed.

And as you can see 'State' is the method which invokes that particular control style:

Although I've diverted from the games original 'Tank' control scheme to better suit a modern audience, I've retained some of the other core movement mechanics.

To better explain this; in the original if the player is moving in any particular direction he will continue to do so even after a camera transision. It isnt until the player stops moving then any new input is then adapted based on the new active camera.
This means that the player could run in a straight line without having to re-adjust that input, even if the camera changes. The game continues to use any input related to that specific camera from when the input was first detected, even if it is no longer active until any movement input has stopped.

While this behaviour may not work smoothly in some areas, I think overall it better suits the gameplay. Otherwise, if the player always held 'up' for example, I could place camera triggers in a way that the game would automatically always move them without interuption, which wouldnt look or feel right.

So even though I've ditched the classic tank controls, I do believe it doesnt distract from the experience and infact will better allow for newer players. This would be a great matter to be discussed in greater length: "The Evolution of Gameplay".

Lighting Issues

This is a screenshot of the level being playing in the editor. As you can see lighting looks great.
However upon building the project, this lighting is lost, the scene still looks good but not as good as it could.

Unity Lighting

Progress on the project is coming along nicely overall. Since modelling is done, I've decided to work on bringing the scene together in Unity and trying to recreate the atmosphere for the Café scene.

In the original the cafe scene is in a seperate area, this allows for a bit more detail to be placed in the scene. 

This is one of a few areas throughout the game that uses this technique. The quality of the scene is quite impressive considering the hardware its running on.

The assets I remodelled when placed in Unity look ok, but lighting is missing and textures need creating.

 The scene is mostly untextured, some post effects are present such as DoF and AO, which do add to the quality somewhat.

The lighting in this screenshot shows the effect I'm trying to achieve, Unity's lighting is pretty limited when it comes to effects such as this, so a 3rd lighting asset is being used to create this. The light shafts look good, but the overall fog tied to it is too over-bearing.

So after a lot of tweaking, the lighting looks much better!

This is the accumulation of the above iterations; DoF, AO and some texturing is done. Light shafts look exactly how I want them, ambient lighting could possible be a bit lighter and the colour grading is off.
But, I think it looks very professional, even at such an early stage. Once all the textures are complete this scene will look great!

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Learning Substance Painter

To continue with my work on the Cafe, I'm now in the process of unwrapping all the models and texturing them. I usually have my own work flow which involved doing said unwrap and then google for real-world textures to place on them. This usually works reasonably well, though for this project I want to achieve a higher level of quality, so I'm having to learn Substance Painter, so here goes:

Here is a model of a bar chair, it's fully modelled, optimised for stray verts and unwrapped:

Now with these two I can import them into Substance Painter (SP). 

After some messing around I ended up with this:

While it looks ugly, it is painted to somewhat what I want. 

I then take this and all its textures and import them into my project:

Its harder to see the detail here, but it is using all the exported materials from SP. 

Here it is again from a better angle:

I think the end result is better than expected. Its currently out of context, so when the whole scene is textured I'm sure it will look much better!

Café 5to2 Final Model

This is the café re-modelled in its entirety. it took a couple of days, especially since I was adding in more detail. Now its onto texturing the whole thing.

Café 5to2 Progress

Progress so far. Everything has been remodelled from scratch to the exact dimensions as the original, no meshes have been re-used.