dev log 05 - new year, new robot

back again with another blog-post

First post of 2026 - Wowza!

This time I've spent a while bringing the player model up to date so that the animations can be networked with the tools from last time.

Here's a before and after of the scrap bot:

As you can see, the new model somewhat simpler.

I liked all the bolts and wires, but I want to remain faithful (or more so) to my original concept art:

It's not 100% faithful, but it's a compromise I'm much happier with.

Plus, now there are fewer bones I have to worry about animating.

Replacing the mesh was fairly easy, but updating the rig and animations was an ordeal.
There were many technical issues with the original rig that made it difficult to work with, so I had to spend significant time patching it.
Fingers would curl randomly, IK/FK would fail to stay keyed, and constraints were applied incorrectly after baking layered animations.
Still, most of that is sorted now - I suspect I will have to continually tinker with the model as I go, but I can do that fairly nondestructively.

making more moves

Next up were some thirdperson/worldmodel animations, along with a slew of amusing issues.

I'm a bit out of practice with this and the proportions of the bot made this a bit tricky, so I'm not too pleased with how these look. I will probably return to these later to do another round of cleanup.

With that said, having some sort of animation to signify what the player is doing (jumping/firing) has been nice.

wrapping up

On a more technical note - I unified much of the player's prediction code under the same system my weapons use. This was a huge pain, however, it allowed me to add a statemachine to the player (helps track when the player jumps). In the future, it should also allow for network compression (assuming that fishnet never finishes its own delta compression).

Now that I have a nice player model and some tools to show more complex player behaviour, I'm going to spend some time working on the player movement. I'm going to try and be fairly consistent with these posts, every two weeks, until work is back in March - we'll see if I can keep things up whilst I'm studying.

Ciao!