Archive:
Setup Preist’s Hole 2 and 3.
I need to make some Rat NPCs, and place them in Room 2, but Room 3 is done. I made a bit of the far wall disappear when you have the wand, exposing a door that’ll short-cut you back to The Hall. Works really nicely.
Also started work on a padlock (for doors) that’ll unlock when you’ve collected a pre-set number of cocktail glasses. Don’t think I’m going to use it very much in this level, but it might be useful elsewhere. (Future Gareth: nope, never used it in the end.)
Finished off the Paint Lock and made various tweaks (added dressing) to The Priest’s Hole rooms.
The Jump Box was a little unreliable when you tried to use it quickly. Dug into the Blueprint, and the problem was down to where I was binding to the Jump event. I was waiting for the box’s appear/disappear animation to complete, at the end of a 0.6 second timeline. Halved the duration of that, and moved the bindings to the first frame of the transition, which seems to fix it. I can speed run with it.
Made shipping builds for Linux, PC and Switch. I mostly work with development builds, but occasionally, you get something broken in shipping builds that you don’t see in dev builds. I’ve been lazy (not checked shipping for a while) but fortunately, everything is fine.
The lighting’s still an issue. The Switch is considerably darker – probably due to the lack of atmospheric fog, and the simplified post-process – but I’d already lifted the directional lights about as much as I’d like to, and I’m close to washing-out on PC. Started looking into per-device settings, to see what I could do, and found r.ToneMapperGamma. Bumping this up a couple of notches fixed the Switch in handheld mode, and made a massive difference to it docked. Nice.
Even so, gamma’s going to need to be a settings option. PC, on an OLED, is a mile away from how I’ve been lighting it on my monitor. I think I’ll add one to the pause screen (when I do that) so you can see it in-situ. The scalability settings can stay in the main menu. Changing those in-game breaks things.
One thing I always wanted to do in the first game was a Nebulus style tube, but on the inside. The Back Stairway seems like the place to finally give this a go.
I’ve been cogitating (ie: trying not to think) for a couple of weeks. I want the player to move in a perfect circle, without collision everywhere (or filthy hacks). I could move the character along a spline, but then I’d have to forcefully inject velocity values into the Animation Blueprint… and jumping would be fiddly… and… No.
Decided the only real way to do it, avoiding hacks, was actual trigonometry; read the left/right throw of the stick, calculate the current angle as a point on a circle, get a trajectory from this, then give that to the MovementComponent and let it do its thing. Animations, collision, etc. would “just work”.
I’m a bit rusty with ATan, but I got it going. Of course, it ended up being a tiny amount of code, and a new bit of maths in the FollowCam.
I’m always a little wary of any maths I’ve not done before (or in a while) in case it bites, so I’m off down the pub for The Beer of Champions.
Slightly hungover… which means today’s the perfect day to get Dot Product out!
I want the platforms nearest to the camera to fade out with the wall. It means everything in the room will need to Tick, get the forward vector of the camera, calc their specific fade value using the Dot Product, and apply it to a dynamic material. I don’t think it’ll be a perf issue, but hey, profile it later if things slow down.
The overall effect came out a lot better than I hoped!
Got the room laid out. I’ll finesse it tomorrow.
Added some placeholder bats. They move, but they’re not animated. (They’ll need rigging at some point.)
Tweaked the layout of the room, added a Dragon 32 carpet at the bottom, and a couple of billboard (camera facing) polygons on either side of the walls to act as brick edges. They really sell the rotation.
There are crumbling / reappearing platforms, wand versions of the same, moving platforms and some friendly timed-jumps. Nothing too strenuous.
Only problem atm is that you can’t get out of the room. I’m going to have to make some custom doors.
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