Work Log

    We started off quite strong. Everyone had something to do and new features were being added and bugs were getting fixed every hour. The first roadblock we came to was due to networking. The first time we tried to build was about three hours in and the project packaged without any errors but many warnings, so as far as I was concerned it had succeed 100%. We noticed the problem though when we tried to open the .exe in order to test the game. It didn't. You could run the program and we could see on Task Manager that it would open then immediately close with no errors or messages or anything. We had nothing to go off and no starting point. About an hour later we had came to the conclusion  that the project had somehow messed up (based off several answers from the ue4 answer hub) and to fix it we would have to create a new one and migrate everything over. No one wanted to do this but it seemed it was our only option. Midway through migrating the project, Austen realized ...

Jan 6 - 16     This week has been different from previous weeks. I am now splitting my time between two projects; Trespasser and the 2020 Creative Jam prototype. So far this has been a 75/25 split of my time; Trespasser / CJ prototype.     For trespasser I have been working hard to get it done as fast as possible as I would like to finish it before the year is over. I started out the week with a new feature: the backpack. We realized it would be nearly impossible to complete the game while only being able to have two items at a time, one in each hand, so we decided that a backpack with multiple item slots would be the best fix. For the most part it was pretty easy, just attaching the item to a socket when it overlapped and attaching the backpack to the back of the player's head when they store it. The only thing really to note about this implementation was that we used an enum to store a value of what was in each slot. This was done to future proof the game for a...

Oct 21 - Dec 9     A lot of time has passed since I have explained what I have been doing. Many things have happened over the last month and a half. I have worked on the AI monster, the environment, VR physics, optimization, and about all other pieces of game-play for Trespasser. 1) AI     The major changes and challenges here had to do with just being able to see what the monster is actually doing. The VR display cuts off important AI variable values when in VR mode. This means that many print strings and  draw debugs were used to visually comprehend what the monster was thinking. There weren't any game breaking issues with the monster other than the animation being  jittery and frantic at times.     I was also able to completely flesh out the different stages of the AI and his abilities at each stage. To do this there were lots of switch on Enum nodes that would dictate what the monster could do at each stage. Edit 12/12: Much of the AI s...

Dec 11     Today was the first deadline for Trespasser. For programming, we were planning to show off the monster and other game-play elements in the dev-test world, separately from the main map that was not finished. Failures:     Upgrading the engine version 20 minutes before demo time. This was the worst mistake ever and I will never try to do it again. The reason I wanted to update to UE 4.24 was because it had enhanced the Niagara particle system (which we were looking into using while developing the fire particle on the lighter) as well as better terrain editing and a new hair simulation system (Neo said that he was interested in doing hair simulation for one of the animal carcasses). I had thought that we had already upgraded the project version on Monday when the new engine came out, but instead we had all just downloaded it and hadn't actually converted the project. We realized this when there were new meshes imported in 4.24 and the 4.23 working copies...

Oct 14-18     Last week was mainly small bug fixes and dealing with SVN issues. Dealing with the SVN was a pain but I think now it will be worth the time we spent fixing it. The first thing I wanted to do was to remove the old repos to avoid stuff being taken from other projects and breaking redirectors. This caused the main issue as we tried to delete repos that had files that were still locked, just on working copies we didn't have. The way we overcame this was to go into the "check for modifications" window and get locks for all files. Then it complained that we didn't have locks for some of the files because of those locks on non-existent working copies. To fix that we were able to break those locks and release all of the other locks. Only after ll of that we were able to delete the old directories. Also in my research into SVN-Unreal integration, I found that it is not possible to check in DefaultGame.ini or DefaultEngine.ini like you would any other file. Inst...

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...

Sept/27 - Oct/3     Over the last week I have been working nonstop to get the prototype to a working state before the deadline today. The main problem was with the AI perception. With the PC version of the prototype, I was able to use the 'OnTargetPerceptionUpdated' event to have the monster detect and then follow the player. But in VR, I could not use that system because 1) The player object location is at the center of the play-space and so the AI wouldn't properly track the player and 2) Teleportation broke the line of sight and so would immediately send the monster into its suspicion behavior.     I tried three different fixes to the problem. The first of which was to do the same concept as with the flashlight and attach an invisible cone to the face of the monster to detect collision. This did not work for two different reasons. The first is that, at this point, I did not realize that the player had to be set as a vector location instead of an object because ...