Archive:
Today was all about the Paint Collectables; the Red Green and Blue collectables that I want to scatter around the game. There’re going to be lots of them in each map, and they can only be collected once. This needs to be tracked all the way back to the Save Game. A slightly bigger job than expected, mainly because I was looking for a way to do it with as little setup in the editor as possible…
Room Controllers already track static and dynamic actors, so I’ve added another array for the paint. Room Controllers talk to the Game State, which can initiate changes to the Save Game, but… the paint collectables need to identify themselves uniquely, so when the map loads, anything that’s been collected can destroy itself.
It’s possible to write automation scripts in the editor, but I’ve never tried until now. I was hoping to populate an array of Room Controllers, directly in the Game State blueprint, by looking through the actors that I’d placed in the world… but that wasn’t possible. Instead, I was able to grab all the placed Room Controllers, write unique identifiers [UIDs] and “Zone” information into them, which they then pass to the Game State during load/save. There’s a possibility that save games will be invalidated when I do this, but I’ve not written them yet, so… whatevs…
Anyway, it worked. It’ll save me a lot of typing; I can run the automation script, it’ll update everything, and I’ll be able to write validation utilities further down the line.
Well, I say it worked. I’ve not tested it yet.
Did a model for the red paint pickup, based on the power-up from Xenon II. Made ambient VFX and collection VFX and gave yesterday’s code a better test. Everything’s looking OK, I still need to push state up to the Save Game structure when leaving the map… but I’ll do that “at some point”. (I always do the save game last, I can’t be arsed maintaining that all the way through a project.)
Added a “Predator” style variant to the paint collectables, so some can remain invisible until you get close to them. Very Nintendo.
Also fixed a couple of bugs I noticed on the Steam Deck over the weekend.
Another homage to Head Over Heels: Toasters and Toaster Robots! (I went for a proper CPC palette. Chinnyvision would be proud?)
The glass is nice, but I need to make sure it fades with the walls.
Bug fix and tidy-up day. A couple of the pops/glitches I’d seen on the player character were right bastards to track down, but they’re fixed, and the -build’s in good shape.
Tested the Switch and Steam Deck, and everything’s good. There’s a slight perf issue in the Main Deck on switch, but this probably down to the number of Tick events from the paint collectables. (Future Gareth: it wasn’t, it was overdraw from the VFX attached to the pickups)
Curry!
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