10/7-11
Oct 7-11
Over the past week I have been doing two major things. Organizing the programming team and redoing the flashlight. Monday and Tuesday were spent teaching the first year programmers in the group what the SVN is and how to use it. This was made a little easier with the integrated source control in UE4, but it was still challenging to understand the concept and how to work in it as a team. We did find a bug in unreal in the integrated source control. If you tried to sync your content folder with the SVN's, unreal would crash and once you loaded it back up, then it would sync. Also with the integrated source control is the developer folder that I did not know existed. This will be useful for our whole team and having a place where we can test new blueprints before creating them in he main project.
Getting the flashlight to work in the way we wanted (the player would have to pick up a flashlight object and could use the input on that hand to activate a directional light on the object) was a lot more difficult than it should have been. The first problem arose when I tried to get the player to just pick up the object itself. I was trying to attach it to a socket on the hand mesh but for some reason it just wasn't working. I figured out that it was because you had to actually had to get a reference to the mesh to access the sockets. Now that I have learned that it makes sense but it just adds another step into everything that requires a socket to attach in order to be picked up.
The next problem was a weird one. If you picked up the flashlight in your left hand, the mesh would go inside-out. It turns out that this was caused because in order to render a left hand with a right hand mesh, the people at unreal just inverted the scale on the left hand. This inside-out mesh problem was fixed by just keeping world sale when the flashlight is attached to the socket.
The final challenge with the flashlight was the input. Getting the left hand and the right hand to act as separate inputs. To fix this I looked to the already existing blueprint for grabbing with each hand. The way that unreal did it was having each hand as a separate input, then calling the same function from each, passing it the left or right hand to execute it on. So to get the flashlight to work, an input event is called on the pawn, which then tells one of the hands (MotionController_BP) to check for and then activate a flashlight, then the motion controller calls an event on the Flashlight_BP that actually sets the intensity of the directional light.
Over the past week I have been doing two major things. Organizing the programming team and redoing the flashlight. Monday and Tuesday were spent teaching the first year programmers in the group what the SVN is and how to use it. This was made a little easier with the integrated source control in UE4, but it was still challenging to understand the concept and how to work in it as a team. We did find a bug in unreal in the integrated source control. If you tried to sync your content folder with the SVN's, unreal would crash and once you loaded it back up, then it would sync. Also with the integrated source control is the developer folder that I did not know existed. This will be useful for our whole team and having a place where we can test new blueprints before creating them in he main project.
Getting the flashlight to work in the way we wanted (the player would have to pick up a flashlight object and could use the input on that hand to activate a directional light on the object) was a lot more difficult than it should have been. The first problem arose when I tried to get the player to just pick up the object itself. I was trying to attach it to a socket on the hand mesh but for some reason it just wasn't working. I figured out that it was because you had to actually had to get a reference to the mesh to access the sockets. Now that I have learned that it makes sense but it just adds another step into everything that requires a socket to attach in order to be picked up.
The next problem was a weird one. If you picked up the flashlight in your left hand, the mesh would go inside-out. It turns out that this was caused because in order to render a left hand with a right hand mesh, the people at unreal just inverted the scale on the left hand. This inside-out mesh problem was fixed by just keeping world sale when the flashlight is attached to the socket.
The final challenge with the flashlight was the input. Getting the left hand and the right hand to act as separate inputs. To fix this I looked to the already existing blueprint for grabbing with each hand. The way that unreal did it was having each hand as a separate input, then calling the same function from each, passing it the left or right hand to execute it on. So to get the flashlight to work, an input event is called on the pawn, which then tells one of the hands (MotionController_BP) to check for and then activate a flashlight, then the motion controller calls an event on the Flashlight_BP that actually sets the intensity of the directional light.
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