Archive:
Made new particle effects for the crumbling platforms, Under The Attic, and added a respawn point, half-way through the room. Now you’re not trudging through the entire room every time you die.
One of the things I’ve never really understood about UE is why everything ticks – calls an update function, to move, look for the player, or whatever – every frame, by default. I mean, I sorta get it, but it’s a weird quirk when you have to use blueprints as prefabs. Worse, when you only find out about it when performance drops off a cliff, you run the analyser, and see that you’ve got 300k Tick events being called each frame. (Happened to me while making Maenhir, which was ‘fun’).
dumpticks spits out a list of every Actor Component that’s registered to tick, and which are enabled or disabled. Dead handy, when things start slowing down, and a good place to start. In Lumo, nothing outside the active room should be ticking (except the stuff I don’t have a lot of direct control over…), but it’s easy to overlook things. And I had. Most egregious were the doors, which never needed to tick. Some things were dumb, like the exploding room parts. And a few things never implemented the RoomControllerObject interface, so were floating around oblivious to everything. So I fixed all that, which halved the number of things tick, tick, ticking. Boom.
(Future Gareth: And this still came back, right at the end of QA. We chased down ticks until the very end.)
Spent the afternoon basking in the sun, running through the game on the Switch and the Steam Deck, to see how things were doing. The Deck is solid 60 everywhere and feeling great. Perf on the Switch isn’t ideal, hovering around 30fps, but it’s not going to get any better (well, unless I went to a forward renderer, maybe, but I’m not going to do that). There were two issues though, Uridium and Space Toms weren’t lit. Black except for emissives. WTF?
Ok, not sure why this is a thing, but Uridium and Toms weren’t lit because there were two directional lights in the scene. This makes zero sense because the other maps have two directionals, and they’re fine. In fact, I’m fairly sure I started Space Toms by cut-and-pasting Sandy Whites…
I dug in a little bit, but couldn’t really see any reason why, so I fixed both by removing one of the lights. This turned out to be a decent solution. Space Tom’s second light was only there to highlight the player character. Since my Switch scalability settings disable the skylight, and by the looks of it, ambient cube maps in the post process volume, I’ve done a quick pass at re-lighting the entire thing. The skylight was only there to hide the noise the chequered floor creates in the mid-ground, so I tweaked the size of the grid in the material. Not perfect, but less noisy than it was.
I removed the backlight, sky atmosphere, and an unused Fluid Ninja actor from Uridium, and this looks fine on the Switch. The only big difference is that there’s no star, next to the planet. Doubt anyone will notice.
I also went through the explosions used in both maps, and set their scalability settings. The big ones were absolutely hammering the Switch. :/
Annnd, Impossible Mission now has its duck! You need to search each computer in the first room to unlock it, then carry it to the exit. I had to change the layout of the robots to make this doable, but it’s all hooked up. Dead simple to complete.
I’ve made the most evil room in the game, so far! The Backdoor.
This is multi-pass. First time through, you use the conveyors to get to the end of the room. There you’ll find some buttons. Push them in the right order and a carry duck appears, back by the entrance. Work your way there, pick up the duck, and turn on the wand. Wand activated moving platforms appear, which will let you walk the Duck back to the far end, where it’ll be collected. It’s definitely easier if you’ve done Moonbase first, as you’ll have the double jump, but walking the Duck back is hilarious, regardless. It took me three or four attempts before I got it down, and I’ve been giggling at it all day. It’s so frustrating when you cock it up at the end :D
The Tool Shed. I’ve been thinking about what to do in here for ages, but beyond, “killer tools”, I’ve been struggling to come up with a good idea. I was thinking, drill bits poking through the ground, circular saws flying at you, etc. but when I sat down this morning, I realised some of that was going to be tricky. Lumo had the benefit of a fixed camera, meaning I could have geometry poking out the back of walls and under the floor. None of that works once you have the camera rotating around.
I started messing around with Box3D Masks in a material, to hide things as they move up and down through the floor & walls, but that leave holes. I could do it with height-based masks, but it’d be a load of bespoke materials for each room, which would work, but feels meh. So, sod it, I’ve gone for the lazy option, dropped the drill bits and focused on the moving platforms. The cheat is to set the mesh’s origin on one of the sides, and scale the geometry to give the effect of a moving platform. Downside of being lazy: the texture would warp, so they’re all metal. Oh, well.
I did get the circular saw blades in. With a hidden (because of the motion blur) Draper Tools logo, as is right and proper if you’re a grey-haired Southampton FC supporter. I also brought in the spider from Maenhir, and set it up to dangle from a thread, swinging from side-to-side. The thread is a cable actor – something I had no idea existed until today – that gives you a decent approximation of a physics-based rope. Added bonus, this scratches off one of the oldest Maenhir TODO items: how to render a fishing line…
The hammers aren’t marching. Yet.
Finished off the Tool Shed. The hammers are marching and everything’s killing you where it should.
I’ve hidden a destructible cardboard box at the dark end of the room, but this one’s hiding a Wand Charge, which necessitated a few changes to how PickupByPlayer_Effects work and respawn. They weren’t expecting to be controlled by another actor. While I was in there, I decided to make a couple of fairly fundamental changes to Wand Charges across the entire game; they now reappear after 25 seconds, regardless of how much charge you have, and they’ll also respawn when you die. In the first game, you had to leave the room and re-enter, but that’s been feeling increasingly harsh. This way, any room that needs the charge only forces you to recollect it, not lose any progress you may have made in the room.
I also dressed The Observatory, in Moonbase, and added a very obvious, easy to collect Boom box. This will, most likely, be the first one the player collects, but it’s not doing a perfect job at re-enforcing that you need to collect the tapes in the order that they’ve spawned… Not much else I can do in that room, though.
Friends:
If you like any of my work, please consider checking out some of the fantastic games made by the following super talented people:
