Stairway to Independence Day

Happy Independence Day!

I hope everyone had a safe and fun Independence Day! The last couple weeks I've been gamifiying Antiutopia significantly. The previous temporary in-game UI elements have been replaced with more polished and fitting elements, and there's also now a pre-game/end-game intermission mission timer to add some polish.

I managed to run into a really cool effect while I was in the process of tweaking/adding in a simple death animation. Originally, I had planned on having a "kill-cam", which would turn into a free-roam camera, and would point towards your killer. Since I'm already attaching the camera actor to the head bone, once the player plays a death animation, we get an awesome effect where the camera follows the body drop, so through a first-person perspective it appears you're getting knocked down!

Another noteworthy change is some additional improvements to my custom physics engine. While playing around with map collision loading I inadvertently realized my collision system, in a buggy way, was already supporting slanted planes, and what started as a simple experiment quickly evolved into a broader overhaul.

Up until now, my collision system primarily relied on infinite planes to represent the world floors. So essentially, we had one big level- like Doom. I shifted this logic into triangles, which interestingly, much of the underlying mathematics is nearly identical to the plane collision. Each triangle stores its own vertices, normal, and bounding info, which allows collision to be tested against the actual shape of the object rather than an infinite plane.

These improvements not only make creating new maps significantly easier, but also lay the groundwork for more varied environments and gameplay scenarios in future updates!

From here, I had a new problem. The players body collision was still represented by an Axis-Aligned Bounding Box (AABB), largely because thats the system I originally implemented while following Sanjay Madhav's Game Programming in C++. AABBs work well on flat surfaces, they don't handle sloped terrain particularly gracefully. Hence my refenence earlier about the buggy system.

So the natural solution was to transition player collision over to capsules instead. It didn't take too long to tie capsules into my physics world, most of the mathmatical logic came from Real-Time Collision Detection by Christer Ericson, with the rest involving adapting my existing collision pipeline to support the new shape.

Of course, I should also mention I've finished off about 5 rifles so far. Currently theres three modern tactical style rifles, which are your generic shooter guns. Plus, two sci-fi inspired rifles to invoke the more futuristic style I'm attempting to achieve with Antiutopia.

Here's a short demonstration of the game so far!

That's about all for now. Keep an eye out for more updates!
- Nick

- 7/6/2026