Archive:
Few bits and pieces, today:
I added a "Reset Camera" input, so when you press both shoulder buttons, the camera will lerp to a pre-defined ‘default’ position for the room. I imagine most rooms will have the same default, but if I start messing about with gravity, it could be anything. Or even change during gameplay?
It's possible to define custom physics surface types. These are useful; each material has a default physics material, which you can query at runtime. If you want to know what sort of impact effect to spawn, or what audio cue to play, you can get this information out of a hit result via a ray or sphere-cast. I've created 11 surface types, set up the audio classes, created some attenuation defaults and added Animation Notifies to the Player Character: As each foot approaches the ground, a ray cast looks for the material on the ground, and its physics surface type lets me know which audio effect to play.
Then spent an hour auditioning reverb setups... Annoyingly, the camera (which has the listener) needs to be within the Audio Volume for its reverb settings to be applied. I'm wondering if I should move the mic in front of the camera, or if that would sound weird when things spatialise across surround setups...
Today was not productive. First I had a weird build error that required a clean and rebuild of everything, which er, takes a while with a source build.
Then Windows shat itself and I stopped getting audio out of the motherboard's Line Out. No bother, I have an internal Xonar sound card... Except I'd forgotten: when the PC's under load, which, er, is quite a lot of the time when running UE5, the Xonar pauses for a second. Like it's starved. Bloody useless and highly irritating.
I spent a good hour in Device Manager, removing devices, restarting the PC, reinstalling devices, and cursing.
Then Live Coding stopped working... Took me ages to work out that the server hadn't compiled... At which point I lost the will to live.
But I did squeak in some Debug Hud: I can see current Tags on the player, Attribute Effects working, and the state of the Inventory. Probably pointless, as I'll have a proper Hud at some point, but until then.
Nothing's blown up today. So far...
Implemented the basics of the Jump Box. It's got a new model and slightly improved textures. The core functionality is in, but it needs a good test. I have a plan for the VFX -- I'd like to use the dissolution materials and Niagara Emitters from Maenhir to make it disintegrate -- but it's been a couple of years since I looked at that stuff.
I think it's time to make a larger room, with everything in, that'll act as the permanent Dojo. Tomorrow's job.
Messed about adding effects to the Jump Box and landed on a Planar Dissolve material, with some particle emissions sampled off the Mesh UVs. It's not as nice as the dissolution in Maenhir, but I couldn't get that to look acceptable in the time it takes the box to disappear.
The jump box was glowing in the first game, which was a standardised way I used to attract the player to interactive elements, but I don't think I'll do that this time. I quite like the glint in the Zelda games, so I might try something along those lines.
Spent the afternoon sketching out room names and ideas for each location: The Manor is based on Jet Set Willy. Moon Bas Relief on Exile. Sandy White’s... Nothing's stuck yet. Well apart from being cheeky and doing a bit of Antesher?
Anyway. I think I’m going to have to take a week or two off for our house move. Something will come to me.
Friends:
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