Third weeks blog post.

This week we had to work with terrains. I remember working with them before so texturing and height mapping them was pretty easy. But then we also worked on particle effects and skyboxes. Skyboxes are always hard to deal with because the player can get to the edge of the map or see into the void if the sky isn't connected to land. But I came up with a pretty simple and fast solution. Seeing as to how we don't have to make anything fancy, I decided that cliffs would make it easy to hide the void from the player. So the player enters into a medium amount of land surrounded by cliffs. This makes it much easier to work with the boundaries of the map.

In a normal map that couldn't use such a simple blocking plan, I would have to have the land stop the player before coming to close to the edge. It could be done with a bunch of bushes and trees, as well as some other unnatural building. Some fog and foliage would help to hide the back walls of the skybox as well. No doubt things like this will have to be dealt with in the course project seeing as to how it's outside.

As for particle effect work, I didn't remember any work with them if I have done any. They seemed pretty simple and fast to make. But they add a lot to the game. I wish I could put lots and lots of effects in the maps because they do a very good job of making realistic map effects. But that would likely slow down gameplay. Which reminds me that I may not have been the easiest with the amount of stuff in my map. I fear I would have a harder time feeling the effects of the particles and graphics because my computer is so powerful. I know the effects of these kinds of computer differences from moving games that worked fine to the school computers to find that they are unbearably slow.

One problem I ran into when working on my rain particle effect, was that the lifetime I had given it caused it to have a odd delay. I guess it was the effect of the rain falling to the point that the particle max would be reached and the rain would wait for deleting to respawn. I had to fix it by lowering the lifetime, which worked pretty well and made the particles have no delay when respawning.

Second weeks blog post.

This week I worked on my level. I added Interp actors and coded a win/loss condition for my game. The interp actors worked pretty good after I got them set up with matinee. I used kismet to get the doors to open when shot at with a plasma gun. For the door to work forward and back I had to create a bool that would tell it when it should reverse and when it should play forward.

For the win/loss condition, I had to set up a time amount to get the items required and get back. It took a little bit to come up with a good number to deal with getting the items and fighting the bots. But I came up with 40 seconds as a good time. For the items and win condition part I set up a integer comparison. When someone triggers a trigger it will add to the total amount of items they have. Then if they get back to the car in time and have 2/2 items, they win. Now and then I've seen it glitch and not let you win, but I had a hard time narrowing the reason because it's on and off. It should be fixed now though, it might have been the trigger was set to only trigger once.

First week blog post.

Work on the course project went fine. My other group members and I have come up with an RTS game. We've also been working ahead a bit to get resources to use on our map.

As for work on my lab project, it is coming along. I have the house I decided to make pretty much together, I just have to worry about what I'll be putting into it exactly. The custom meshes and characters will no doubt take some time, as well as adding materials to the house. As well, the dimensions I had planned were a little bit more inaccurate than I expected. In my plan and in the game seem to be two very different things. But so far things are coming along.

I also have to try to come up with what the true goal and win loss of the map will be. So far my idea is that you have to get some items and leave before time is up.

First Blog.

I'm starting up my first blog today. I'm still not sure what exactly goes into blogs, but I'm sure it will come along.
My first blogs will be about my working on programming projects for school. While I haven't gotten much under my belt to talk about yet, I should find more soon enough.