Archive:
I’m waaaay overdue a post.
A lot has been going on, on the dev-side, and in my personal life. I’ve had a bit of a holiday, I’ve been to the UK and back, and I’m at the start of trying to move away from Helsinki, and back to Tampere. My plans of a heads down summer of work didn’t really happen. Oh well :D
Due to the travel, hanging about in airports and nights in hotels, Neutrino has had a fair bit of attention. Effectively the engine side of it is complete.
Box2D has been integrated. I’m not a massive fan of Box2D, but it’s simple enough to use and reasonably fast for a small number of objects. I’ve gone the whole hog this time and written the debug renderer for the physics world! Seeing what’s happening under the hood really does make a difference.
Neutrino is still single threaded, and still, effectively, vsync locked. I’m going to do a bit of work at some point to move Box2D over to another thread and fix the fucking timestep, at which point it’d be interesting to see it run on a GSync screen. But anyway…
Still not much to look at, but it’s getting there. Next step is to make a particle emitter editor, bullet trajectory “pattern” editor and a spline editor for the attack waves. Then I think I can make some levels…
A month or so ago I decided that I had a lot of bits, but I didn’t have a game. I really should start putting this all together.
Steam’s a good forcing function for this: If I’m going to make an online game then I really need to have it running through Steam and then get some other people to play it! To do that, I’ll need working UI and a proper flow in-and-out of the various game modes.
UI in UE4 is pretty lovely. UMG has its quirks, but it works, looks good, and compared to the complete abomination in Unity, is a joy to put together. And — shock — I really like Blueprints for chaining UI together. Delay node ftw!
That being said, there’s still a lot of UI screens to put together — once you throw in game-modes, with options, lobby screens, error handling etc. — but I have a working screen for each part of this (with no real thought applied to the styling atm) and I’m able to enter and exit a game.
Online Session handling (like pretty much everything else in UE4) is piss poorly documented. There’s a video showing you how to do it in Blueprints, and a working example in Shooter Game that does it in C++. Because it’s so intrinsically tied to the UI, for the first pass I opted to start a simple blueprint session and see if I can connect to it via Steam. This took the better part of a day, but it does actually work; I can see hosted games over Steam, pull up some small bits of information about them, and I can join and leave a session. Wow!
The problem is, the blueprint stuff doesn’t really have any idea about any of the custom parameters that define a hosted session, so I’m going to have to go back under the hood and do this properly in C++. Then I can filter against game mode, see the name of the server, handle friend invites and the like. But for now, just for the purposes of development, I have a “game” that I can upload to Steam, send to friends, and we can run about and shoot each.
Time to grey box some levels to run around in.
Musings, random thoughts, work in progress screenshots, and occasional swears at Unreal Engine's lack of documentation -- this is a rare insight into what happens when a supposedly professional game developer plans very little up-front, and instead follows where the jokes lead them.
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