Archive:
Added a camera manager and the scaffold that allows the camera to rotate around the player. This is the Big New Thing that a lot of material tech will be based on, so it needs to go in early.
Got to the point where player movement is based on the camera's rotation, so "forward" (up on the stick) will always go where the camera's pointing. Feels ok, but I need some kinda of "auto-aim"; if the player's input is close to a cardinal direction then it's probably best to snap to that.
Moved the player movement out of Blueprint and into C++. Maths is easier in C++ and this is gonna require a bit of fiddling.
Spent a couple of hours on the "aim assist".
I'm comparing the camera's forward direction (which can be rotated) with 8 fixed directions in the world: the four compass directions, and the diagonals in-between them. If the camera's "close enough" to one of these, then I snap to it. Otherwise forward will be wherever the camera is pointing.
I’ve also got old-school 8-way movement, like the first game, but I’m not sure whether I’ll expose that. Auto aim means that analogue input should feel pretty natural. There’ll be a small visual pop if you look for it, but the character will go where you want it more often than not. Analogue input was an afterthought in the first game…
I need my walls, and object attached to them, to fade in and out as the camera rotates. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I’ve ended up with the following:
Material Parameter Collection to control masked alpha valuesMaterial Instances, using static switch parameters in the master material to decide which direction they care about. North, South, East & West.My Game Mode checks the camera's yaw and updates the material parameters each tick... Bingo! I have walls that fade in and out.
It's perfect at Iso projections, but the player will be able to have the camera straight on, which will leave a couple of walls in a ghostly state. I think objects in this state should have no collision, but that begs the question; what would happen to the player if they were stand in a ghosted object? Experimentation needed.
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