Back to normal ?
So it took longer than expected (™ ).
1st, the last month was kinda ok work-wise, not too great, but with most workers on holidays after the 1st week of August, the house has been quieter.
And now, almost all construction work is done; there are something like 3 or 4 days left of work to do, and it should be done for good.
Plus my older kid got back to school last week, so I finally have some decent time to work, or at least when the small one doesn't come to jump on me...
Anyway, I had to work on a big update during the beginning of August, to tune a bunch of gameplay elements and fix a series of annoying bugs, so I switched back to the controller icons later than expected.
And there I realized that Unity (the engine I'm using) although it pimps itself as being multiplatform & everything, didn't do anything about the consistency of the controls over the different platforms ; eg: the axis & button order of the XBox controller wasn't the same on Windows & Mac. Bummer...
So I made the jump : I bought and integrated Rewired. I had planned to do that for a while, because Unity doesn't handle well some exotic controllers, have some little bugs, and can't handle decently controller hot-plugging ; actually the newest Unity's Input library may be able to do all that, but I preferred to go the Rewired way as it looked a lot more battled-tested and polyvalent than the new Unity Input system.
So it was relatively easy to integrate it once I understood how to use Rewired as a platform-agnostic low-level input system (which is not really designed for, at least not in the documentation, as its goal is very high-level), and thus the controller icons followed shortly after, as you can see on this screenshot :
I also took the occasion to improve the menu navigation so it's somewhat decent to use a controller with them. I think the result is ok, but I'm really not sure Microsoft & Sony will agree and let me release TE4 with the menus in that state. So if you notice anything weird, please let me know..!
After that, I finally added the possibility to tune the World Tour player AI using the real-time coaching system created for TEM2. The trick has been that I also needed to handle that setting in the Training Club, so exporting the players to the Training Club wouldn't change their strategy, else it'd have been disappointed not to play against the real Federer or Nadal behavior when you just want to do a simple match.
So I ended up adding a couple of buttons to assign & clear the AI strategy in the Training Club.
Now, there's left the issue of having different strategies depending on the surface speed. I'll see if it's really needed to add the support for this or not.
Looking ahead
So now, I'm left with the outfit Modding that I hoped to finish at end of July...
I did a good check and I have likely a big week of work to do all that is required to make it possible to install the outift Mods without touching any existing .ini file and to have several different outfit Mods fitting together without doing anything special. (so the end-users will have an easier time to install Mods)
But I might get delayed : this morning, checking a Bug Report, I stumbled upon a big issue that could create desync, both online and when replaying the whole match. So of course, I had to fix that right away..!
And now, I have to build & upload all the new versions (ManaGames.com & Steam, Windows & Mac, TE4 & TEM2, demo for TE4) ; doing only the full version of TE4 already takes a big hour ; TEM2 is ~30 minutes more ; and ~30 more minutes for the TE4 demo. It's mostly waiting, but when the game is being built, I can't work, so I have to do that very early in the morning or in the evening, so it doesn't eat up my little available work time where I can attack the big things...
After the Modding outfit, I'm not sure what I'll be doing, which will be the 1st time for a long long while. I think I'm going to tackle a bit with the Motion Matching plugin I bought last year to see if it could help to give more natural moving animations to our tennis players. I have some doubt it'll work well, because the tennis movements are really not like in other games, so I'm not sure I'll get the settings to tune it to reach a good result.
I'm also hesitating a bit to give the commentaries some work, so they'd sound less random, but it feels like a titanic task, and maybe I should do other things 1st...
Anyway, see you next time to see all of this goes !
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