I didn't do much over winter break. I mostly focused on trying to put out some fires with the bugs in the game. Did some, such as now preventing the rider from being able to mount the dragon from any distance. I also spent a good amount of time trying to get the verticle island movement working again, with mixed results. I was hoping to get a first playable by the end of Winter Break, but obviously that did not happen. However I will still continue to try and put out the various bug fires in this game.
0 Comments
These passed 2 weeks were suffering. After meeting with our Adviser last week following our previous presentation, we set up a large amount of milestones to achieve before the Alpha pitch. A crazy amount of time was spent all over the project, adding new feature, fixing bugs, and integrating art assets to try and reach the alpha deadline. Personally, I spent majority of my time on many new features, including fixing timer/win state, working on dragon combat/cross hair aiming, large amount of bug fixing, and integrating both the new environmental art assets and dragon effects/animations into unreal. New Map with Environment: Part of the Dragon BP Pros: More work has been done, art has finally been integrated, networking in better condition, nearly all functionality of dragon and riders in, Island vertical movement integrated, code not fully implemented yet though. Although rough, we have enough functions in to get a good game in for beta.
Cons: Networking is destroying us. Every function we try to add, we must spend another day or two figuring out how to get it to work over the server. Just getting everything to work on both server and client has severely affected our progress, and there is no easy solution to it. I am wholly convinced that if we weren't convinced by the faculty in week 4 to adopt networking and have local multiplayer, we would have nearly all of the functions we cut already. Hours worked over passed 2 weeks: 39 hours The past 2 weeks had a good amount of progress on the coding side, although still not as much as we'd like. One big thing we tackled was the discovery of a major game breaking bug in our game, where client side controls were not being replicated over to the server, and the client could not function correctly. This took an entire weekend to solve, but we eventually discovered what the problem was, that basic Unreal Inputs on the client would not be read by the server, and that specific events must be called that would be replicated over to the server must be used. Once this was found, the fix was then applied to all existing dragon and and player functions. On my own programming work, I have gotten some more work done with the AI. While I have not set up AI behavior trees, I have found a work around using Unreal RVO collision avoidance, which after a good amount of time spent experimenting with, I was able to get it so the floating islands AI now see each other, no longer phase through one another, and actually try to move around other islands when they realize their path is blocked Some other minor edits have been done also been done, such as adding a round timer and making it so islands move to the correct position when captured, instead of only partially close to the correct position. I also attempted to implement the Alpha version of our dragon, but was unable to due to my unfamiliarity with Animation retargeting. Sally will try later
Pros: Lots of programming bug fires put out Islands now have smarter AI Can finally move onto more game programming such as Win States, vertical island movement, and Sudden death Cons: Unplanned bug fixing has put us back a few days even more Coding in general is still more behind than I'd like Art is also behind The past 2 weeks have been extremely productive for myself. The first week was spent primarily on setting up the map of the game and creating the logic of the moving islands and the logic of the islands being captured. This took an extremely long time due to my unfamiliarity with the AI and Navmesh systems of Unreal. This was done by connecting small, AI controllers, at the bottom of the floating islands which then drive the movement of the islands. This creates a pretty good movement, however they currently cannot see the borders of the other islands due to the way the navmesh works. Once this worked I was able to move on and set it so islands can be captured by players, and move to their respective bases. Next, I had to set up the logic of how the islands lock themselves and connect to the main base island of the team that captures it. This works off of 2 arrays which always fills the first open slot in the array. The logic of this got pretty funky, but works well After this, Ruben and I had spent time integrating our two separate projects together. This took some time, and file management got somewhat out of control, but the networked splitscreen now works on my map. This broke some of the current logic of the game as they were incompatible between the two maps, but Ruben is currently working on fixing that. Also I got perforce set up this weekend, so now the entire team can access the perforce server, checkout blueprints, and edit the project. I am still not entirely sure how to make branches of the main project, but that will be figured out this week
Most of this week was spent in a combination of animation, meetings, and programming in Unreal.
As a team, we had multiple meetings throughout the week to discuss the feedback we had gotten from the rough faculty pitch. The main topics discussed were changes to game modes and art. This went on for several days, and eventually with some help from Tony, we have decided to change our primary game mode from a shifting objective to a conquest style game mode where capturing the floating islands is the objective. Besides this, I have spent several hours this week animating a dragon model I have gotten from the internet. These are rough animations that will not be used in the game, but are being made so we have animations and a model to work off of when we begin programming the dragon in earnest. Lastly, I have created the primary project file which will become our game, and have begun laying out the groundwork for many of the needed functions. I have also designed a temporary max size of the map, which is around 350mX200m. This is based on the size of some of the larger maps found in multiplayer shooter games such as Halo. I will be going off of this size for now, and make adjustments as needed as production continues. Pros: Game has more finalize game mode A lot of animation work has been finish on my end Cons: Feel like scope has gone up due to inclusion of networking Not enough programming done this week on my end |
Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories
All
|