Corona-cation (Day 25)

Juggling projects


    Today I went back to working on the top down game. I was assigned to finish 2 of the enemies so that I could work with our animator and get everything everything working; animations lining up with ai tasks and that kind of thing. I chose to finish the Plague Doctor and the skeleton archer (mostly because I had already done most of the work on them, but don't tell the team that). These enemies had had some attacks added to them in the new design doc, most of which were variations on already existing attacks. 
    For example, the archer was given a triple shot which would just be calling the shoot function three times. I did this but then quickly ran into issues. The first being that, as the three arrows would fire, they would all try to attach to each other like they would to a player. I fixed this simply by checking that the actor that the arrow collided with wasn't another arrow.
    The next problem was that the arrows weren't actually sticking to the players like they should. I spent a good while trying to figure out why, and looking around the internet before I actually read what the function was doing. We were using the "attach to actor" node which had a name variable input which was plugged in to the hit bone. I did not however read that the input was asking for a socket name and not a bone name. When I noticed this though I realized what this meant in terms of attaching to the player. My first thought was to add a socket to every bone, named in a way so that I could just get the bone name from the hit result and append "_socket". I quickly realized that this would not be the best solution when I saw the bone tree had more than 5 bones. 
    For the time being I have come up with a solution that is passable. That is to use the spine bone to attach to. By doing this it will track with rotation and all but is less accurate in terms of placement on the mesh.
    Note I also had to do a few other things to get it working fully. I had to disable gravity on the projectile otherwise it would attach to the player but then immediately fall back down. I also had do disable collision on the arrow as if I didn't the player would constantly collide with it, in some cases making them fly. *flashbacks to box-fly in step back game*
    Tomorrow I will work on the Plague Doctor and making the poison effect into an in-world item that splashes and stuff.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A New Chapter

Image
     This week has presented the biggest change probably since the release of Mini Solar System; I was offered a full-time position as a junior programmer at Studio 369 which I was happy to accept. I start on Monday and I couldn't be more excited to work with the team there! However, this did mean though that my priorities shifted quite instantaneously. I went from working full-time on "RPG_Game" to preparing for this new job. This mainly meant getting up to speed on networking as that is the one area of Unreal Engine I feel I have a lack of knowledge in (I'm already proficient in UI, AI, gameplay, materials, and general backend work), and since 369's specialty is networking I figured I would come prepared. I did do a little work on "RPG_Game" but it was minimal just to tie up some loose ends. Unreal's Multiplayer Framework      As explained by the Unreal Engine documentation, "multiplayer programming [is] inherently more complex than programmin...
Read more

Progress Update #2

Star Properties     It seems to have become tradition that whenever I set out to do something that I think will be easy, it ends up being the opposite. Making properties for the stars was no different. There were two main parts to this process. Making changes to variables apply to the material, and making those changes affect the lighting of the planets.     Making the variables apply to the material was not that hard as I had done that before. It just ended up being a time consuming process to do for all the properties. All that I had to do was implement a  PostEditChangeProperty for every property and set a vector or scalar parameter value for each on a UMaterialInstanceDynamic. Here's what that looks like for radius and mass: void AStar ::PostEditChangeProperty( FPropertyChangedEvent & PropertyChangedEvent) { if (PropertyChangedEvent.Property != nullptr ) { const FName PropertyName(PropertyChangedEvent.Property->GetName()); if...
Read more

Summer Work (Day 16)

Image
Planet Coloring pt.1.5     Within the past day, I have managed to add full color to the planets. Although it took more time and effort than I would have expected, I am happy with the result.     The biggest challenge I had to overcome was getting a color gradient. In Unity, there is simply a variable type 'Gradient' that gives you a nice small UI to pick colors and can be converted to a 2D texture that can be used in the shader graph. What's wrong with that? Well Unreal decided that wouldn't be complicated enough.     So after a bit of searching online for "ue4 gradient" or "color gradient ue4", I came across this forum answer that introduced me to curves. So instead of having variable type 'Gradient' you would have ' UCurveLinearColor' because that's so much more intuitive. Then you will have to create a Curve of type LinearColor in the content browser. Now once you assign assign that variable in the details panel, and open the ...
Read more