Personal Development Project - Blog Entry 5

Attempting animation retargeting

I looked online for a free model of hands, so that I wasn’t using the base unreal engine 4 model when I finished the game. This proved to be a huge issue however, as the model I chose did not have all of the transferable re-targetable elements, which the original had the skeleton of the body, these arms did not, thus, the animation failed to work on these hands.

For now I will just use the basic model from UE4 and re-texture it to make it look different.

Re-attempting animation retargeting

I knew the issue with the retargeting I had the first time was that the model I used was not created hierarchically with UE4 in mind, I installed a free UE4 model from the marketplace.

The model was made by epic for the game paragon.

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/paragon-lt-belica#

I then took the model into 3DS max and deleted the body and changed the hierarchy so that it can be re-imported into unreal 4, as there were hierarchy issues initially.

The issue I had last time was that (rather stupidly of me) I didn’t select ALL of the elements within the 3DS max scene, as a result, the mesh would be the only thing that carried over and the skeleton wouldn’t be connected.

After this I went through the unreal tutorial videos on how to re-target animations, as it was stretched and malformed.

This involved changing the translation settings in the retargeting field.

After that, the model worked with the animation blueprint perfectly, and it makes the game look visually so much better.

Visual enhancements

I decided to add some particle effects to the game in order to create a greater sense of reality to the game and further immerse the player. The pack from epic I downloaded included a muzzle flash, I decided to add this to the game via a spawn emitter at attached node, which is at the muzzle of the gun.

I then removed the orange sphere that was my original projectile and replaced it with a particle effect that I removed elements of and scaled up, in order to make it look like a laser.

Turret Damage

I started to flesh out my turret’s damage system, I made it so that the turret has different damage values for different parts of its body. This decision was made to deepen the combat system, the player can now make tactical decisions as to where it wants to shoot the enemy to cause maximum damage, and also give the turret and advantage of being protected at certain elements of its body.

I differentiated the different damage elements through alternate box collisions assigned to different parts of the mesh.

Stability improvements

In order to maintain the stability of my game I decided to move over from a more engine intensive version of firing, to an engine friendly alternative via line trace. This makes the game run smoother as it is not spawning objects in and out of existence every time a bullet is fired. This also makes the turret health system run better as overlaps are easier to manage.

This meant that my aiming was off, as now the line trace was pointed towards the center of the screen.

Thus I needed to change my aiming cross-hair so that it was centred onto the screen:

Attempting damage via raytrace

After switching over to raytrace I needed to reset the damage system, this proved to be difficult as without a projectile that can simply hit a box collision, I now needed to create a whole new system in which the raytrace reacted to different box collisions by dealing different damage values.

I attempted making a version of this inside of the character, calling to the turret externally. This unfortunately did not work as it would destroy the actor in 2 hits, dealing all the damage values at once.

I then tried to circumvent this by creating a Boolean system that only deals the specific damage is that bool has been activated, unfortunately, I had no way of setting these bools to true without firing at the area in the first place. The logic was circular and thus wouldn’t work.

I tried setting the Booleans to true inside the turret, calling to the character when they hit the specific components, then deactivating after the damage was applied. This didn’t work however. I will keep this damage system in mind, however I think that for now I will move on to more important design elements. I have made the system work so that the same damage value is applied to the full mesh for now.

Gameplay alterations

I decided that the player being able to spam the shooting button was bad as they could easily dispatch of enemies. I made a fire rate in order to circumvent this.

I removed the fire event and instead made this, which makes it so that you cannot fire for .75 seconds after you fired previously.

I then made it so that the player can’t shoot while wall climbing, or turning from the wall climb to jump.

Wall climb alterations

To make the wall climbing work better I decided to make it so that the player actually looks up when they start wall climbing. This makes it easier for the player to get a sense of when to turn and jump, or when they are closer to the top of the wall climb.

This caused problems however, since I can no longer look up or down.

To fix this I had to disconnect the reverse animation, and instead I made it so that the players view would be set back to normal in the wall turn timeline instead.

Additionally I changed the delay on the turn before time stops to .2 milliseconds from .1 milliseconds. This made the turns run smoother for some reason.

Adding head bob

In order to maximise immersion I wanted to add a head bob, making the movement feel realistic.

I made it so that the headbob gets more intense when the player runs, and also made it so that the headbob doesn’t play when the player is performing certain actions. For instance, it doesn’t activate when the player is wall running, this is because I want the player to be focused and not distracted by a headbob in those moments.

Adding more immersion

Another thing I did was remove the skeletal mesh and gun when the player is rope swinging or climbing up walls. I attempted to make it so that the mesh does out of view before turning invisible but wasn’t able to make this happen, as a result the mesh just turns invisible for the duration of a rope swing and wall climb.