iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 14h

#devtober day 1, outsourcing the terrain blending. I've tried solving this myself a few times, so I wanted to try kronnect's nice edge fusion library. Works well but takes a bit of setup, and still getting some artifacts. Less free time this year 👨‍🍼but enough to be productive.

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Reposted by @schooliedee.bsky.social

Jonah Davidson @hangedman.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Quest 64 Randomizer "MERROW" v50 has arrived! hangedman.itch.io/merrow Quick patch shortcuts, shuffled enemy packs (maybe unstable), Beigis in boss shuffle, new (old) Bubble spell, and more. I delayed v50 a long time to build a big milestone, but then I ran out of space on the 'What's New' list, so,

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Had an idea over the weekend for an alternative to unity's sharp tile-based terrain gaps (which are funnily incompatible with quest's sharp geometry). Got it working this morning and started integrating the new staggart environment libraries. Still working on this, just busy o7

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Spent this afternoon writing a preprocessor to recognize and animate certain phrases in the Quest dialogue, without needing to add style info to the dialogue text explicitly. Also, I joined a studio and now do unity stuff for a living, but I'm still doing this too dw.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Last Melrode kid, Todd, and 8/53 for the number of NPC models up to Solvaring. Todd's 2 original animations were both pretty energetic, so I wanted to save him for last and learn with the first 3. Adding small root offsets really helped out with these.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

3/4 Melrode kids done, just one more for the gang. I think whoever made the "just make it exist first, you can make it good later" should win some sort of award. It's been fun getting into modeling and knowing that things will look goofy but that it's ok.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Tried the 2nd melrode kid today and had a lot of trouble with his weird head shape and odd expression. Each of the kids also has their own super exaggerated running animation, which only plays when they turn towards you, so I think they were probably meant to run around town.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Starting the Melrode kids, tried Pete today since he only seemed a little more complicated than a stationary treasure chest.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Started learning how blender's texture painting stuff works. Chest came out alright, but I probably redid the UV stuff like 4+ times.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Started playing with HUD ideas and working on the interaction popups. I'd like to keep as much color and charm as possible, without falling into the "white bars + small text remaster UI" meme, but it's hard to get the quirky shapes and fun fonts to look reasonable in higher res.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Been going through for the last week or so and getting the blocked vertical slice building and ironing out the issues, it's slowly becoming almost playable.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Trying to do the Man Eater from scratch, minus some bone models and a ground texture. It's turning out alright, and this will hopefully help my confidence when starting the NPCs.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Used some of the "between jobs" time to work on the enemy model silhouettes. The original commissions were very good imo, way better than I could've hoped for after providing low-res emulator screenshots.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Used some of the day off to finish blocking Dondoran's interiors. If you've been following this project for a while, this may seem like reverse progress, but I wanted to go back and redo some areas to sure the general feel and muscle memory came through.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

The goofy system I've been using to block the dondoran building heights -- moving brian until he's on the roof.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Started blocking out Dondoran yesterday, also fiddling with the door exit animations to use root motion. It does bring the autowalk doors much closer to the original though.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

#devtober day 31 - Shannon blinking Wanted to finish with something visual, and luckily I found a nice tutorial on how to implement blinking with blendshapes by @evepaints_ -- linked below. The Shannon model was a commission last year from k_catz on fiverr, briefly shown to the Quest 64 discord.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

#devtober day 30 - easier ik look for npcs There were 2 previous attempts with this with the newer Rigging system, but I learned today that there is just a built-in function for this on the default animator object. Way simpler and just takes a few seconds to set up.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

#devtober day 29 - more blocking and camera work The stairwell areas are blocked with the lua data, and the stencil issue was just a typo somewhere. The last camera issue is handling collision and closeness, and figuring out why the npcs now talk to you while pouting.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

#devtober day 28 - blocking and door issues Adjusted the animation / IK stuff to play nicely with doors and the new 30 fps sim stuff, but the denser layouts are inviting problems with the stencil door trick from last year.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

#devtober day 27 - better map data from lua Finished the map data exporter with landmine's help, adding npcs and doors between areas. A common question is "how far do you want the project to get", and every tool like this helps that answer extend further out etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

#devtober day 26 - aligning monastery data Unglamourous work to get the monastery data lined up with the npc locations + names exported. Will start blocking out tomorrow, too late tonight etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

#devtober day 25 - starting magnet rock About 20m in, I remembered why I kept skipping this one. Added a rock dissolve shader and updated the particle event stuff to take a scaling coefficient. The rolling rock dust is too aggressive atm and overall colors feel mushy.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

#devtober day 24 - fiddling with magnet rock ideas The decal thing from magma ball would make it easier to do a dirt trail from the original's sliding rock animation, but the current placeholder has grown on me. Maybe there's another place to use this one.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

#devtober day 23 - spinning I guess Spent the majority of today's time matching brian's rotation to the fps vs. the original 30 fps sim, but then realized that recording this would not show anything -- "rtx on" etc. So instead I tied the animator to the sim, and it now does the spin thing.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

#devtober day 22 - magma ball visual arrangement This was one of the trickier ones to date, and was the first to require 2 unique shaders -- a wobbly lava one and a decal to let me partially "reveal" a lava texture in the travel path. Also thinking of doing an october recap vid, lmk if interested.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

#devtober days 20 + 21 - starting magma ball The color profile of this one has been odd, with the streak things being a mix of red, yellow, and pink. I have a semi-functioning lava shader, but I'm not sure if it's needed. Complementing it on bare ground always feels hard.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

#devtober day 19 - fire pillar 2nd iteration Sped up the main motion after being surprised at how fast the original animation is. Agreed with ratdev's comment yesterday about it looking more like lava, so I added some of the fire 1/2/3 trail sprites and adjusted the color some.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

#devtober day 18 - fire pillar attempt 1 Trying to use the particle system as much as I can, along with a pretty versatile shader from the Hovl kits for the base pillars. Cutout feels to aggressive atm.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

#devtober day 17 - studying fire pillar Recorded and studied the Fire Pillar visual today and I will probably end up doing a fully scripted visual for this. I think without the little shuffling motion it does in the middle, Unity's particle system could get pretty close though.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

#devtober day 16 - rolling rock 2 Thursdays are long work days for me, so I played around with an alternate idea for rolling rock 2 where it uses two rocks that crisscross. It's always felt a little underwhelming as the highest damaging earth spell.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

#devtober day 15 - rolling rock 1 Given the last few math heavy days, I wanted to take a break and check off one of the remaining spell visuals. Was also a good opportunity to make sure things still behaved after all the camera work.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

#devtober day 14 - part 2 of simulated follow cam The basic follow cam is starting to get there, but I'll need to sit down and work out a solution for the 30-fps magic numbers for a variable fps environment. Also didn't realize that the quest follow cam has npc avoidance!

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

#devtober day 13 - part 1 of the follow camera conversion Spent most of the day off on working through the decomp site for the default / follow camera, then started the process of going from C -> unity. As usual, the first stab did not work at all, but it gives me something to noodle on at work.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

#devtober day 12 - adjusting the cloak shawl I was feeling pretty good about this until I opened unity and realized I'd given him an airplane pillow. Will table this and resume camera work tomorrow. If anyone with some modeling XP wants to take a stab at this, ping me on discord @schooliedee

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

#devtober day 11 - part 4 of movement parity I have a rough version of the Quest 64 movement system being simulated at the original 30 fps (reusing the projectile sim approach), and it's starting to feel a little closer. Was a big relief to finally see the walking + spin behavior for slow U-turns.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

#devtober day 10 - part 3 of movement parity In normal gamedev fashion, what seemed simple has spiraled outward as Quest 64 apparently uses a goofy little state machine for its movement. Piecing it together has been a bit tedious, so good timing for a 3-day weekend.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

#devtober day 9 - day 2 of movement parity work After some confusion, the Quest64 code seems to have 3 distinct movement functions for a player and we were looking at the wrong one? Realized this pretty late, so I just recorded test data and will work the unity side tomorrow.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

#devtober day 8 - part 1 of movement parity Got home a little late tonight, but the fixed camera work has highlighted some small deviations in the movement. I plotted and added an analog -> movement speed curve that matches the original, but it's still a bit off.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

#devtober day 7 - part 2 of fixed camera parity With yesterday's work being held up by a dumb typo, the fixed camera areas are working pretty closely to the original now. This will help magnify subtle things like slide activation time, general area feel, post-warp orientation etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

#devtober day 6, step 1 of fixed camera parity Unglamourous afternoon of porting the original code for the Fixed camera mode into unity to replace my placeholder approach with spherical coords. Big highlight of the day was Rain from the quest64 discord matching the function so quickly.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

#devtober day 5, sub evaluators While I could poll the original map + camera data from an area, I could not do this with multiple sources. Today's work was to add support for an evaluator to have "sub evaluators" which will help with interiors like dondoran and the monastery.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

#devtober day 4 - using the original fixed camera system. Dondoran's U-shaped secret room is a good example of this, as the upstairs balcony is actually on the same submap and let me swap between the default camera mode and a fixed one. This will hopefully replace my sea of indoor virtual cameras.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

#devtober day 3 - decal shadows for areas with indirect light. This was partly in yesterday's, but I'm trying to incorporate a slight decal shadow for actors to use in some lighting conditions. Trying just realtime shadows presented an odd look when moving through patchy shadows like canopies.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

#devtober day 2, circle alignment. Continuing the process of gutting the placeholder systems and replacing them with the decomp results. Today's was getting the random battle check to use the original's circle data. This neatly (and thankfully) replaces the shaky procedural system I'd attempted.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

#devtober day 1 - WIP terrain elevation alignment for the original Quest map data. I have spent the last few weeks working on tool development to align Unity terrains and geometry with an exported version of the original stuff. Unity's sparse terrain docs mean this is mostly trial and error lol.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Spent the last few weekends working on a way to export the original map data into a unity-friendly format to reference as I build out each area. This has been surprisingly tedious (impossible without quest's decomp team), but there's a unique feeling when farfetched ideas start to take shape. 🧵

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

About a month ago, Mallos matched the Quest 64 combat camera code in the decomp project, which helped explain why my own attempt felt off. The original cuts the arena into slices and applies an angle offset depending on where Brian is.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Been working over the last few weekends to have the camera system more closely match what we're finding in the Quest 64 decomp effort. I'd originally built the camera system with a spherical coordinate system, but the original project uses something closer to cylindrical coordinates.

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