Barotrauma Dev Tracker

The Great Crawler Attack: a #Barotrauma short film by Ghosted:

#Barotrauma modders never cease to amaze me with the stuff they do with the game. Here's a good example from the Into The Abyss mod by Scale: dry caves & grappling hooks: #gamedev #modding #indiegame

In our latest blog post we take another sneak peek into the next #Barotrauma update. The vast Abyss between Europa's surface layers and the ocean floor has been pretty empty since the Steam release, but that's about to change.... #gamedev #IndieGameDev

We're writing a more detailed blog post about this later, but in a nutshell, we switched to a blockchain-based solution. Since the character's legs are essentially chains of blocks, simulating them in a #blockchain is much more accurate than doing them on the player's CPU.

However, we've got good news for those who are still missing the legacy pant slots: we've now come up with an approach that allows us to reintroduce the swappable pants in a much more robust way!

In more technical terms, we couldn't use either Manhattan distance or Euclidian distance to evaluate paths, but had to use a much more complex random walk algorithm that takes the Brownian motion in the pants into account. #gamedev

The swappable pants also caused some pathfinding concerns; the character's movement speed and agility were depended on the type of pants they were wearing.

As a side note, @Naughty_Dog reportedly had similar issues when developing the 1st Crash Bandicoot game; their solution was to actually remove the pants altogether, and paint the blue jeans directly on Crash's legs!

If you've played the legacy version you probably remember how clunky the animations were: this was due to the complications posed by the pants. #gamedev

Barotrauma uses #procedural, physics-based animations, and the clothes the characters are wearing affect these animations: heavy or stiff clothes obviously restrict the characters' movement more than others. #gamedev

Many assumed this was just to streamline things, but in reality it was due to the fact that swappable pants are surprisingly tricky to implement in games and caused so much headache that we decided to get rid of them.

I'll jump on the "things in games that are more complex to implement than you'd expect" bandwagon and tell a story about pants. When we moved from #Barotrauma's legacy version to Steam, we decided to combine the inventory slots for pants and shirts into 1 clothing slot. #gamedev