Hey everyone,
Remember when i said that the drones were mostly finished? I lied. After testing we decided to add a few features for our drone. To give more visual feedback to the player. This week I fixed some bugs with the behaviourtree and I added the ablility to destroy the batterypack in the back of a drone. This way stealthy gameplay is encouraged.
Cheers,
Vermeulen Igor
Hi,
Last week I added the ability to crouch and started work on being able to hide in bushes.This simply uses a collision box which only blocks an enemy’s vision.
This week , we were finally able to start adding content in a faster way , seeing as most base functionalities are already in place. Melee weapons now just need a simple mesh , they inherit from the melee weapon base and just need a custom mesh , animations are all used by just putting the weapon mesh in the arms socket.
Third and last , ranged weapons are almost fully implemented , with ammo boxes being added to the inventory and correctly adding ammo if you have previously already picked up ammo of the same sort.
Next week we should be adding in 2-handed weapons.
Hey,
This week was a “deadline” as other people will play our game. This is why I kept on improving the drone ai instead of starting the wildlife. I implemented animations made by the artists. Also I made it so that the drones can go away when it’s night. Some major gamebreaking bugs were also fixed this week.
I playtested with the ai a lot and it feels pretty good.
Cheers,
Vermeulen Igor
Hey everyone!
This week I finished the drones main functions (as I mentioned previous week). Only 1 things is not yet implemented, the disappearing when it’s night. Other then this the drone has all of its functionality and it is pretty hard to shake him off.
However, I do believe the drone will need some slight changes such as a close range (hard hitting) attack. This behavior is already in the tree but it is inactive for now. The further evolution of our game will point out how it will go. I do know 1 more small bug with the drones, but if we would opt for the hard hitting attack, it won’t occur anymore. So I’m going to wait before fixing it (it’s pretty tedious).
Since next week will be the testing of our game by other students, I will help wherever I can to polish everything up. In my spare time I will start with the wildlife AI.
That’s it for this week!
Cheers,
Vermeulen Igor
Hey all,
This week, big surprise, I worked on improving the drones even more. They will now keep better track of the players whereabouts. Also if you come too close they will automatically sense you (they do have a blind spot tho!).
If a drone loses the player it will go to the last known playerposition. If it arrives there it will look around (needs lil bit of tweaking) before going back to its normal behavior.
These changes make the drone feel stickier to the player once they have successfully seen you.
A little bit more info about the drones awareness:
In green we have the drone’s vision. It has an angle of 120 degrees and can see up to a certain amount of units (this was tweaked many times so I don’t remember what the final value was anymore). If the player enters this range, the drone will scan the player for 1.5seconds. If succesful: the drone will chase you. If not: the drone thinks it was just his imagination 😉
In red is the range for automatic detection. When the player enters here the drone’s sensors will automatically sense the player and start to attack him.
In blue we have the blind spot. The player is safe in this area. We may or may not add a way to remove the battery from its back if the player can successfully sneak up behind the drone.
Features I will add for next week are:
If time allows me I would like to start on the wildlife AI too.
That’s it for this week!
Cheers,
Vermeulen Igor
Hey everyone,
This week I focused on making the AI move smoother. The turning of the AI happened instantly, after adjusting some settings he can now turn smooth, this does not work 100% yet so it still needs some tweaking before I can push it into the main branch.
Cheers,
Igor Vermeulen
Hi there,
This week I started off optimizing and expanding our random spawn system. The system now works as it should. There is one spawnpoint actor that you can place in the world. All that’s needed is to select which type of object it should spawn. Everything else is managed by the Spawner. The spawner finds and collects every spawnpoint on runtime and populates it with one of many suitable objects for each particular spawn type.
The spawner also has several parameters you can use to set the maximum amount of duplicates of certain types of objects.
You can easily add new object to the 3 pre-made catgegories. Or you can of course add an entirely new category with a new icon.
Then I started working on our interactable system. Which is basically a modular expandable database of interactable objects. Every object we will make will inherit from a parent “interactable” class which provides some crucial parameters. And then each object can do what it needs to do seperate from that.
As you can see below a light switch only works when the right generator is providing electricity. This is all managed by our “Level database actor” which detects when an object has been activated or when the player is trying to activate one it will check if the right conditions are met.
The player and HUD have also been updated to detect what object the player is looking at and depending on how far the player is from it he is now able to activate or deactivate it using “E”. We already have a couple interactable objects in our map and a small house in which you spawn each time you play the game. The position of the house is of course also randomized using the system I made. You can also spawn random objects within the randomly spawned buildings using child actors (random-ception!).
We want each playthrough of our game to provide a completely different experience. So it’s very important that our systems for this are modular and future proof. So I took a lot of time to optimize it as much as possible. And I’m still tweaking it as we go. This also makes it extremely easy and fast to create new interactables and objects.
I’ve also added several character effects. Such as weapon sway.
Footstep sounds that are perfectly synchronized with the run and walking animations. Using animation notifications.
Every footstep sound you hear is one of 5 random footstep sounds. Again randomization is key!
And camera shake effects when running and getting hit and …
I’ve also made several small placeholder and WIP models such as a radio tower, house, power cabin, generator and lamps.
Hey everyone!
This week was kind of a crunch week for us since we had to do a LOT to create the gameplay we actually wanted.
The first thing I changed was the Day and Night controller. It’s now more accurate and also controls the light intensity. This way it can be really really dark at night 🙂
Second thing is this guy:
I updated its software a bit and he is now capable of:
I also improved its lens and scope so he won’t lose track of the player if he is on higher ground (I reworked the way the drone sees the player, so it’s more accurate).
All these changes give us the gameplay we are aiming for. It’s going to be a mix of stealth and surviving to find your way throughout the forest.
That’s it for this week!
Cheers,
Vermeulen Igor
The last two weeks i started looking into the ability of having multiple weapons and switching between them. I rewrote most of my basic weapon code and replaced it into a base weapon which just contains a bunch of empty functions and the necessary variables for the weapons. Every weapon inherits from base weapon ofcourse.
I also started work on a melee weapon , for this i just added a simple collider in front of the player character , upon “firing” your melee weapon actors inside this will get checked and dealt damage to accordingly.
Sprinting has also been fixed.
Hello everyone,
This time I tweaked the ai drone a bit so that it matches more with what we tested (speed etc). I also added the possibility to stun and kill the drone when shot.
Cheers,
Vermeulen Igor
