Witness Protection - 10/2/2015 - Character model/animations, and more

[Landy]

Due to the new Witness Protection being a remake from (mostly) the ground up, it's no surprise that I've been working on re-animating the character models.

CHARACTER MODELS

The first thing I'd like to show is...the new player model!!
The new one is on the left, and the old one is on the right.

.....and as you can see, it looks no different.

This is because instead of re-modeling, I did a re-rigging job on the new model.

The new model has a neck (not always visible) as well as collar bones. Here's a stupid test I did to demonstrate:

This method of rigging lets us to use Unity's more flexible animation system, known as Mecanim. Mecanim allows for things like animation blending (used for walking/strafing animations) and is generally a very nice system when it works.

This also means that the days of no walking animations are OVER! And your playermodel won't look bland as all hell when holding weapons, like this old model:

Instead, he'll look more like this:

Kind of mockup-ish as I don't personally know how to layer animations - that's Stryke's job.

GAME FEEL

I've been re-working the sound assets to sound more fresh and clean. Gunshots will feel more powerful, reloads will feel more active and the sound will just feel nicer as a whole.
We're also working with another sound designer, who you guys may know as "Spy" or "Red Spy" or something. He did the assault rifle sounds in the older version, and we're bringing him in again to see what he can do for the new version.

Stryke is working on coding his own movement system. The old system was using the default Unity first-person controller, and can only really be described as "sticky, clunky, shoddy..." The list goes on.
The new system will allow smoother walking, and JUMPING. We were originally going to replace the jumping with a forward lunge, like in the game Black Shades, but now we've decided on using jumping. Not sure what we're doing with the forward lunge, as Stryke hasn't really commented on it. I can only assume it's being cut.

I'm also giving the game a new soundtrack. Expect to hear some different tunes while you're blasting away at that VIP...or a pesky hitman.

CUT CONTENT

Naturally, with every iteration comes cut content. You remember the flare model I did for the older version?

Sadly, it doesn't look like it's going to be used this time around.

You might also remember this ammobox (if not, I don't blame you)

This was going to restore your ammo, obviously. It had a cute little spinning animation like a Quake 3 item, too.
This item I'm actually not sure about. Stryke will have to decide on it's use, but considering the flares being cut, I can imagine he'll be cutting this ammobox as well.

And as I said before, the forward lunge has a high chance to be cut. I could probably try and re-purpose it's pose for a prone animation of some sort...but I'm not entirely sure.

GET HYPE!

If you enjoyed the original version of the game, you'll be even more excited for this version. It's everything you loved about the old version, but like 10 times better, and more.
Hopefully we can do more progress on the game. School eats up a lot of our time...and so does the beta of Rainbow Six: Siege, but that's not the main point here.
What I'm hoping to do is a Rust-styled devlog every two weeks or so. I'm not sure about Stryke's plans, if he has any. But considering his schedule for actually updating the game, you'll probably get devlogs from me a lot more often than devlogs from him.

Thanks for sticking with us, guys. Adios!

-Landy