Archive:
I spotted a weird issue before the Xmas break that, I think, was related to the Niagara systems I was using as engine trails on enemy NPCs. When I was teleporting the dead NPCs back to origin (and returning them to the Actor Pool), I’d get a periodic GPU crash. This was not recoverable… After a bit of Xmas cogitating, I did a quick test by removing the trails and yeah… I didn’t see the crash. This morning, I replaced the attached Niagara Components with spawned-in ones that I destroy before I do any teleporting. Not seen the crash since, so I think that’s the fix? (Possibly defeats some of the point of pooling the actors in the first place, though…)
Created a new NPC: a rotating turret that tracks the player. So yeah, decision made. It doesn’t matter if the player dies a couple of times on this level.
The turrets aren’t shooting yet – I’ll get that going tomorrow – but they can be shot, and they’re tied into the Dreadnought’s overall damage calculation.
Also added Red Point Games’ clang-tidy for Unreal Engine, and fixed up a couple of issues that it found. I’m surprised at how clean my code is, tbh.
The Player can die! Sounds simple, took all day.
I opted to add a few broadcast delegates to the GameMode: OnPlayerHasDied, OnPlayerHasRespawned and OnLevelEnded. Bullets and Enemies return to their pools on player death. Wave Spawners pause until the player respawns. The GameMode does any clean-up it thinks necessary and can (well, will – not implemented yet) play any Level Sequences to top-and-tail the whole thing. Took most of the day, but ended up clean, sans any weird timing issues.
Phew. I have a mini-game!
Made some tweaks to the balance. I’ve stopped the player from being able to shoot enemy bullets, and I’ve upped the frequency that turrets fire. This prevents turret camping; the inertia on the player ship makes it a much more dangerous strategy, now that enemy bullets can’t be destroyed.
Removed as many unused assets as I could find from the plugin, tidied up some blueprints, added some comments for Future Gareth, and took a couple of screenies for the socials. HMS Su Metal needs cutscenes, and the intro / outros, but I’ll save those for a rainy day. Calling this DONE, for now.
Made a build and played through what I’ve made so far, went back over my pre-Xmas TODO list, and organised some things to tackle next week. Then emailed Chris Abbott about officially licensing some C64 music. I’m not going to be able to top Hold My Hand Very Tightly, but I might be able to leave some SID chip tracks about the place…
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