Archive:
Milestone week! MS1 – first playable – which is one of those lovely, loose, deliverables.
I’m heading down to Bath to meet up with Martin, deliver the milestone, have a few beers and talk work. I figure a video’s easier than a playable build; I can add some clues about the things I’ve been “inspired” by, and it’s easier to send around to the team… But I need to polish up some stuff. Especially the intro / outro to the Uridium section. Made a decent first pass on the Intro, and went full-on Battlestar Galactica: fake steady cam, loads of manual focus glitches, and zooms the length of a solar system. It’s made me chuckle all day long.
Spent most of the day on my Battlestar Galactica outro, for the Uridium level I was working on at Xmas. I’m still laughing…
Milestone day!
Milestone passed, hangover gained!
I need some platforms that sink when the player’s touching them. Easy enough; stick a trigger on a Static Mesh, detect the overlap, and start moving. Throw in a little state machine, to handle the transitions and bingo bongo!
Except, that’s a dumb solution. The character has capsule shaped collision, and the trigger’s attached to the object that’s moving… It might do what’s expected, or it might stutter like crazy, just as the player touches it. I realised this about 2 seconds after doing the work, so I’m blaming yesterday’s hangover. The better solution (that I knocked up after) was to create an interface ReactToPlayerTouch and poll the character movement component’s current floor result to see if it’s touching something that implements the Interface. Now, anything the player touches can be a trap.
Time to go back to Willy’s Mansion. The next room is Top Landing, which I thought would be the ideal place to bring back the rolling balls from the first game, but that means a new control scheme. I have all the code I need to possess different pawns – thanks to the Chimera work – so I pushed some of that back up to the base class, made a new Player Character that’s just a ball (I’ll stick an animating skeletal mesh on the top of it later) and wrote a new controller that applies forces to make the ball roll around. Seems to work, but I need to get the room its in to tip… Having had a look at Monkey Ball, it turns out that’s a bit cleverer than I realised. The level geometry tips around an origin that’s directly under the player’s location, no matter where they are, so that’s going to take a bit of setup.
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