Archive:
Took the build to a mate’s at the weekend, for a show and tell curry. He had something very swirly to tell, so I just gave him a quick show. Made me realise that I should do a quick polish-pass on some of the more functional bits of the game, which means… Audio!
I tend to do audio in phases, and as late as possible. Maybe a throw-back to my console days, but I learned that if you want something to take a big leap in a short amount of time, then a sprinkling of audio often does the trick. It’s got me through many a milestone, at the risk of confusing producers into thinking that a thing is “done”, when it wasn’t.
Nothing is finished until everything is finished, as far as I’m concerned.
Quickly found out that I can’t rely on placing audio within rooms. The rooms aren’t far enough away from each other for the ambient sounds to attenuate completely. So I went back into the RoomControllers and added tracking for Ambient Audio. The RoomControllers are now responsible for fading everything in and out… which lead me to a weird bug; if the sound cues aren’t completely deactivated / reactivated during room transition their volume, occasionally, ends up being a 10th of what it should be.
I have no idea why, but I did, at least, get my first tour of UE’s audio debugging commands. (Future Gareth: this is still a problem in the shipping build. Never did get to the bottom of it.)
As a result of all this, Willy’s Mansion’s a lot more atmospheric, Push-Blocks feel heavy, and the Jump Box sounds like it fell out of the Star Wars Universe.
Made good progress with the audio and effect placement:
And I tweaked the footfall detection in the Player Character. It should emit a sound when you land from a jump, and ignore the foot-fall frames as you’re leaping.
I hit that weird bug again, so I spent a bit more time chasing it. I think I’ve narrowed down the cause: FadeIn seems to fade to a value that’s calculated based on where the listener is at the start of the fade, and occasionally, doesn’t update that value correctly if the listener is moving during the fade. It doesn’t break all the time, just on the odd Ambient Actor, here and there. That said, the behaviour’s consistent across platforms and cooked builds. If I could be bothered to drill into the code, I could probably find it and fix it. Or, I could write my own FadeIn. But I’m not going to…
I moved FadeIn to a point where the Camera (and the listener) have finished their movement between rooms, and extended the duration of the FadeOut to cover the gap.
There’s a slightly noticeable duck, but if I add a veeeery quiet “whoosh” to the camera movement, I think it’ll be fine. (Future Gareth: guess who forgot to do that.)
Simple job: doors should animate a little as you go through them.
The ones in the Moonbase do, but for some reason (ie: past Gareth was lazy…), I’ve ended up with a load of block-copy-coded Blueprints everywhere else. And a couple of hacks. What I thought would be a quick job turned into a most-of-the-day one.
Mostly audio today. Added some stings to The Security Guard cut-scene, floor traps now sound like a Katana, paint pickups make a noise when you collect them, and a few other odds and sods rumble in the background. I think I’ll leave this polish pass, for now, and crack on with something else.
Annnd… I made myself laugh again: Space Harrier, right, but instead of the boss that’s a head made from rock, it’s the floating head of Kevin Toms!
Props to Evil Paul for knocking that up. Now I’ve seen it, I can’t not do it. Even better, I think I have a way of getting in touch with Mr Toms to ask permission. Fingies and toes crossed!
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