It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Not to worry, I'm still very hard at work!

I'm right now doing a few optimizations. For instance, I've been preloading too many assets via my global game manager, bogging performance down. So I'm dividing the task. Match-only assets, like battle portraits, fight sounds, etc. are only loaded in matches. Menu sounds and the like only in menus.

Other than that, I'm more than halfway done porting the fighters from Ultimate I want to bring back. Their assets: animations, sounds, models, textures, etc. are in Unitypackage files I'm storing for now. I'm looking forward to slowly unveiling content via trailers and the like, it's gonna be fun!

I'm also currently looking at non-player characters I want to include as well. Assist Trophies, for example, are returning in SSBF. Stay tuned!

Code-wise, I'm looking for ways to improve my edge-detection system. The one where I can't fall off a platform when using for example a roll-dodge. Some movements still make the fighter fall, so I'm thinking of ways to stop that. Next up will be regular edge detection (teetering and edge options).

My ground detector also needs a few tweaks, like shrinking the collider (and making pushboxes work like in Ultimate).

Recently I've also started working on blast zones! Finally, I can respawn if I fall off-stage, making it a lot easier to test things that can risk me falling off. A few issues exist with respawning at the moment: horizontal stick movement is nixed, and I can't get the fighter to stick to the respawn platform.

Oh, and I also adjusted root motion to line up with the scaling system I use for models.

I also made some important pacing adjustments. I zoomed out my in-game camera and made the realization that movement was sluggish and floaty. So I made a few tweaks to movement, jumping, steering, etc. and now all works okay! Horizontal jump speed was too low, making jumps not cover much distance, and root motion was much too slow, as mentioned above. This was obscured by the camera being too close to my single player. It looks fine up close, but zooming out made me see how off my code was.

Finally, as my last little update for this entry, I'm using my Update() function for far fewer tasks, making more and more things coroutine based for more accuracy.

Soon, I intend to record a new gameplay video to showcase all the improvements that are visible. The adjustments in movement alone warrant it, I think.

~KV