ABSENT LOG Dev Update 9/15/2025

This month's update is a little narrow in scope, as the majority of the work the last month was focused on getting a lot of backend systems refined, various bug fixing, and paying off a good chunk of technical debt. So the main project updates section should be a bit beefy this go around.

However, one thing we are finally very excited to show you all is our progress on the CONCOURSE level.

This is a case of a lot of work that’s been built up slowly over the last couple of months.  This is far from a final tally of general level assets for Concourse, but it represents a strong start.

The first batch of modular assets for Concourse, planned as Absent Log’s first real level, have reached a point where we can start really testing them in-engine.  They’ve followed the same basic format established by the prior “Maintenance” asset suite, but are a bit more dense in their topology.  In addition to being the player’s first experience exploring the Sarosha, it’s also the section of the ship that would have made a first impression on arriving crew.  We felt that emphasizing large, smooth panels with rounded edges would help it to feel inviting (and provide a contrast to the more explicitly industrial sections of Sarosha).  We’re happy enough with how these have come along that we’re considering adopting this aesthetic more broadly for general non-industrial areas aboard the ship.

These last couple of images display a stress-test of sorts:

These assets really aren’t meant to represent such a large space on their own.  The idea is that for larger rooms we’ll have more tailored or bespoke geometry defining the space, with these smaller tileable assets helping both to fill the gaps and to provide a sense of uniform construction.  On account of their not being intended for it, I’m surprised at how adequately they fill out such a large space.

From here, building out a proper layout for Concourse should get easier.  These humble walls and tiles are the glue that’ll be holding some (hopefully) pretty cool environments together!


MAIN PROJECT UPDATES:

- Fixed various animation related issues when performing melee attacks. (example, punching while climbing a ladder, vaulting or mantling an object, etc…) 

- Fixed TW’s hard landing, which was not properly calculating dropped velocity and distance. Meaning it would almost never perform a hard landing. The new threshold is falling at a high velocity of 4 meters or more.

- Complete rework the ladder climbing system, tentatively going to say this is fixed for now, extensively tested without issues thus far. You can now climb up and down the ladder, from both the top and bottom. Also resolved the zero world origin teleporting bug when trying to climb from the top.

- Fixed issues related to weapons not attaching correctly to TW’s hand, this was mostly related to the rotation of the weapon not matching TWs hand rotation, creating weird offsets at times.

- Created and implemented new Maintenance level assets, mostly for smaller hallways and corridors. Including are 90 degree connectors, 4 way connectors, and doors + doorway into larger maintenance hallways.

- Added interpolated visual damage effects to mandrones, as they take more and more damage, their appearance will show more grunge in order to boost readability.

- Added proper death animations and refined death effects for Mandrones.

- Re-added death sounds for Mandrones

- Added tram section assets and functionality to RESIDENTIAL, as well as WIP entryway to COMMERCE, + various ambient assets such as new display boards

- Created and added Water treatment facility to RESIDENTIAL, as well as variant assets for maintenance textures to add some visual variety.

- Added various new procedural anomalous effects to digital displays.

- Added reworked walkways to RESIDENTIAL Habzone structures.

- Starting to build out and implement Fitness Center assets for RESIDENTIAL.

- Added a fadeout for bullet decals, no more jittering impact marks!

- Added important epilepsy warning disclaimer.

- Added procedural mist effect to laser sights, as well as edits to laser sights to generally look and feel better to read.

- Added new alt fire functionality to all weapons, we are still planning what each alt fire will be for each respective weapon.

- Created charge shot functionality for Estoc (still needs proper sounds)

- Created homing projectile and lock on system for the Halberd, complete with impact effects and custom lock on graphics.

- Added a bloodied face effect to TW when health falls below a 35% threshold. 

- Reworked TW’s hair textures to look a bit better with proper Anisotropy.

- Further improvements to Heavy Mandrone/ Vizier’s AI. Added some basic directional attacks and a new locomotion animation set.

- Added new sounds for Heavy Mandrone/Vizier.

- Made some post processing tweaks to reduce draw calls, reduce the memory load a bit.

- Wrap up of CONCOURSE level assets and implementation in the engine.

- Created several new decal assets for CONCOURSE in master decal sheet.

- Created 3 new panel detail decals for general use.
- Added various new generic light fixtures.

- Implemented complete column and greeble box assets in the engine.

GAME ASSETS:

Halberd Weapon Setup



“As some of you may recall, the Halberd was originally designed to be a shotgun. But as development continued we came to the conclusion that the design, as cool and unique as it is, didn't really feel like a standard security weapon. It had too much bulk and felt more like some kind of advanced, prototype weapon in development. We decided to pivot by keeping the design, but changing its function to be a form of directed energy weapon.

Tekka had presented an idea of having the weapon fire a series of energy bolts that would track and home onto a target. Aesthetically, we had looked at some of the energy weapons from games like Zone of the Enders, or the beam weapons seen in Eureka  Seven. We wanted to emulate a very similar look and feel.

Getting the functionality for this working was quite an ordeal, and took weeks of work. I started by making the weapon a code variant of the shotgun (since it shoots scattered projectiles at once, to save some work), and changing its reload function to be magazine fed instead of a single round loaded. 

The first hurdle came from creating the homing function for the projectiles, Most other weapons are hit scan, meaning when fired it performs upaninstantaneous line trace from barrel to target, without speed, velocity, or drag. This obviously would not work for this weapon.

Creating the projectile itself wasn't too difficult, as UE has decent functional projectile movement and velocity components out of the box. However the homing part is where things become dramatically complicated. Getting one projectile to home to a target isn't too complicated as long as you save a reference for that target object to home to. However with a scatter shot weapon, we need all 10 projectiles to home to the target. Ideally, you can just do this with a for each loop which will perform a certain action a set number of times.

Example: instead of fire x10 projectiles, it would fire projectiles x10 times.

At the beginning, I had issues where references were not being saved in the loop, or rather, once the first “step” of the loop fired, it would clear the reference to the target. so only one or 2 projectiles would actually home to a target, and the rest would scatter. I ultimately realized that the shotgun fire function was interfering with this loop, as it already saves a reference to a hit target, and with this variant loop function, it was overriding the reference to “none”

To simplify, each time the halberd was fired, it would only target 1 out of 10 projectiles.

I eventually fixed this by just creating a completely new fire function separate from the shotgun fire function. 

The second hurdle, and easily the biggest, was getting the target lock to work.

A few key requirements we had in order to get this working was as follows.

It MUST have a reference box for target threshold (AKA lock on box)

It MUST have  target reticle that track a target (AKA Target Lock)

It MUST ALWAYS target the CLOSEST enemy to you (if it is within range,)

It MUST only target enemies that are directly in front of you, and are within that lock on box

This level of complexity required setting up various dot products to “clamp” targeting ranges to only be within the target box, and even more dot products to determine if an enemy is even within range to be targeted. With alot of these equations happening, it became easy to loose track of values, causing issues such as targeting the furthest enemy instead, or only the first enemy spawned in game only, or projectiles targeting nothing (AKA World Origin Point).

Eventually I got the math figured out and managed to get it fully functioning as intended and the results are incredibly fun. There is a level of skill that naturally comes with the weapon, as not only do you need to time your targeting, you also need to pay attention to a targeted enemy's movement, and determine if your projectiles will hit them before they can get to cover. Another level of skill is that you can actually target enemies if you are behind or if they are,  so if you aim at the right angle, you can arch your shots to slip around the corner they are hiding behind and get some hits. One last cool aspect about this weapon, is that if a shot misses a target, and doesn't hit another surface, it will boomerang back to attempt to hit the target again. It will attempt to do this for a few seconds until it hits something or dies out"

- Loo