Public Dev Blog: Why the (Cursed) Broom Took So Long

Sorry for the long wait, but as promised here's my post explaining the nonsense I encountered with the broom and why I'm thoroughly convinced it's cursed. I'll try my best to keep it short. >_< 

(This is also the first public dev blog! I haven't had much time or content to post for monthly summaries lately so will be posting these when I can.)

I first started this project back in March (yes, March) when Bust the Dust was releasing, as I wanted to get it out immediately since EA failed to give us brooms with the kit. Everything went smoothly at first. I extracted all the files from TSM without a problem, made a clone, the files I made or imported from TSM worked fine, first set of tuning worked out. Then I got to the animations....And nothing I did worked, the broom was always floating in her hands and flashing sideways.

Pancake helped where he could, explaining different things I could try but yet the animations refused to budge. I eventually paused the project and worked on other stuff, revisiting it every now and then to see if I could get it working, but no dice.

Fast forward to September I worked on it again fully and still got nowhere! But Pancake took a look for me and finally, a reason for the broken animations was discovered. Apparently when I was first converting them the rig was somehow corrupted. Neither of us know how or why, but it wasn't noticeable and after re-converting the animations finally worked. All that waiting for nothing, apparently just re-converting would have saved us the headache.

Anddd then came the other bugs. I finished making all of the other interactions and tested each one, but ran into a freezing bug and then this hilarious (but still frustrating) bug where she would pickup the dust bunny and sweep with it. Before it got to this point there was weird UI issues, the sim not doing anything at all to the dust bunny, etc. so that took a few days to track down.

And after that is the bug that took half a month to solve, the stupid board I wanted the brooms to slot to as a place to hold them. The broom was meant to slot vertically to the board, but it's normally horizontal so it can lay on the ground and because the animations needed it that way. But because of it flipping vertically after slotting, the broom wasn't able to be placed on the floor anymore, couldn't be removed for sweeping, and the rig stayed upright, intersecting the floor. I tried allllll kinds of things to get this working, even had Panda and Ravasheen take a look, and that's why I ran that poll, so I could understand what you guys preferred in the end. So I scrapped the board for now and instead made the current system where the brooms go on the wall, similar to the ROM brooms. I eventually want to come back to this idea...but not for a very long time. Pics of the various issues I ran into:

Then after a few other minor mesh issues when working in Blender, I ran into another major bug. And once again, none of my friends had any idea how to solve it. I was working on the final broom mesh, an adjusted version of the classic wood ROM broom. For some reason the mesh was exploding or disappearing, and I solved it, but only by luck. I had to repeat a series of steps that would allow me to import the broom without it exploding or disappearing, but if I did it out of order I had to start over. Ravasheen, Panda and I theorize it's connected to the footprint somehow, but we're not sure the how or why and honestly I don't care anymore, lol.

Of course after that was solved I ran into another issue with this ROM broom, this time for my animations. Because it was too long and thick, I had to re-adjust the mesh and then put it at just the right angle, etc. in Blender for it to work right in the animations. But I could not get it figured out immediately like the other brooms, so I had to repeat those steps at least 30 times. It was an exhausting day....But after a few more things I was finally done! I had never been so ecstatic to be done with a project before, and I was convinced there was nothing left that could happen.

Buuut right after early access release I had realized I forgot to replace the buff image and remove the BtD related strings, and include the sound files. ^^;

Oh, and then two days ago someone came to me with an LE, something about SimInfo's not having a definition and involved my testset for the base game interactions. As usual, nothing solved it. I even switched the tests out with a different one, which worked but gave me another bug where the Sweep interaction was on all objects. All, even the beds and the broom itself were not safe. ;-; There was zero logic to this, because the bed, broom, etc. didn't meet the requirements I had set.

With the amount of stress I was experiencing over this broom, I was extremely close to giving up and just...abandoning the ability for BG users to sweep trash/hair piles/etc. entirely. But Frankk, bless him, came to my rescue and after spending an entire day on it together we finally came up with a whacky solution, which was to just give the SimInfo a fake definition. We're both sure this won't cause any issues so I'll be releasing that update sometime day or tomorrow after I fix some other bugs. Yes, other bugs that somehow slipped past me, like the BG interactions appearing on trashcans too (not part of the other bug), and the fact that the deleting loot for BG wasn't removing the trash/etc. after sweeping anymore. 

So now you have a summary of the mess I've been dealing with and why it took so long despite seeming like a simple project. And honestly, if I had known this was going to happen I likely would not have started this project. I just don't know if the pain was worth it, but time will tell, lol.

Anyways, hope you guys are enjoying the broom!