Archive:
Typical. Give the build to someone for five minutes and they find a bug… Guess who forgot to put a Kill Trigger beneath the floor of the Impossible Mission rooms? So I fixed that…
I also converted the moving platforms to use the PlayerTouch interface, rather than trigger boxes. Because trigger boxes are offset from the base of the platform, it was possible (if you were an alien) to mash the Y button before you’d landed. At which point, bad things could happen. The player wouldn’t be locked onto them properly, and in the worst case, the platform would remain bound to the Y button indefinitely. To be honest, I’ve been meaning to do this for ages. Trigger boxes are a bit Duplo, there’re better ways to detect things.
And since the MS has been delivered, it’s a good time to bounce up to the latest version of UE: 5.4.4! But when I went to pull the tag from Github, my SSD was full. The repository – including binaries, DDC, intermediaries, etc. – was eating up 560gig. lol! Deleted the entire folder, pulled down the release branch, and re-compiled all the things. Before shader compilation I was left with 440gig free, so note to self: delete the UE source folder every time you upgrade. That thing collects cruft.
I’m under the weather. Caught some weird germ off a mate, which he claims to have got at Zzap live. Annoying, because I was there and got away scott free! Spent most of yesterday in bed, but I managed a few hours today…
I don’t use the Wand at all in Moonbas, which is sorta by design – it only really works in dark areas – but having played the build so much recently, I have to admit, it feels like a conspicuous hole. Given the lack of secrets, I figure I’ll lean into the Wand as a way to access hidden areas, and then see where that takes me. First up, those tracking laser things that you used to see in the top-down Zelda games. While I was sweating and coughing the other night, I had a fever-dream-idea to make one of these that looked like The Sentinel.
Turned out to be a decent visual gag!
Ok, there’s something fundamentally broken (read: I don’t understand) about audio attenuation in UE. The audio listener is on the camera. Nothing strange about that. I have a chain of mix classes, and a set of attenuations for different types of effects. Exactly the setup I’ve been using in-engine for years. But, if the camera is level with the sound cue – ie: roughly at the same Z – it’ll be louder than if the camera is above, looking down at the cue.
I can debug the listener, and, according to the arrow that’s drawn on-screen, the listener is rotating with my camera to point in the correct direction. I can draw the attenuation shape of the sound cue, and the camera (and listener) are within its inner-radius. So why is it quieter if I’m above it? (I’m using capsules by default, but it makes no difference what the shape is, or what the other settings are. It’s always quieter.)
I’ve had two or three attempts to work this out, and I’ll be honest, I have no f#cking clue. The difference in distance between looking at something while roughly horizontally, verses from above, is a few centimetres. Definitely not enough to affect the volume to the degree that it does. I can’t find much online about it, and I can’t be bothered to step through the code to work out why it’s doing it. It doesn’t matter if I let the sound cue handle its own attenuation settings, or if I override them directly in the component they’re attached to. It makes no sense, and it’s incredibly annoying because I’ve just made a room where you really want to move the camera above the action, and all the sound effects are coming out at half volume!
I wasted most of the day on this, so I think I’m going to hack the shit out of it: I could add a scene component to the follow cam, keep it at ground level, and attach the audio listener to that. There’s never any audio behind the camera, so it’s not going to do anything weird in surround setups… so I doubt anyone would know the difference… Except me. And maybe you.
What didn’t I check yesterday? The actual audio volume in the map. And guess what? It was a Gnat’s dangly too small, so the camera (and listener) were juuuuuust moving out of it.
Faceplam.
Anyway, problem solved.
Unreal Engine’s had a Geometry Scripting plug-in for a little while now, which I’d entirely forgotten about. It popped up this morning, as I idly scrolled through the Unreal Fest videos, supping my boot-up coffee. And it gave me an idea: I could use the energy barriers I made last week, cut a little hole in them – dynamically – and move the hole about to create a gateway that the player has to get through.
Voila!
In my old man head, this is some amazing voodoo magic, but I bet no one even blinks an eye at it :D
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