Greeting and welcome to lucky newsletter # 7!
The latest video dev log has been released on YouTube and can be found here:
Last Week:
My focus last week was to clean up movement when you have your pistol equipped. This included regular movement as well as parkour moves like vaulting. In my system the arms are tied to a gun rig using IK to override regular animations so I had to set it up to disable those IK when you vaulted
Disabling the IK wasn’t too hard to do but the issue I ran into was due to a fix I did previously to prevent the hand from hovering over empty space. I did this by ray tracing down from the hand location and mirroring the animation if I didn’t detect a spot for the hand to land. This worked really well but to get IK disabling to work right I needed to have a left and right vault animation and select the correct one depending on the same line trace. The code part wasn’t too hard but when trying to mirror the animation in blender I had many issues so I ended up buying a new parkour animation set off the Unreal asset store to get my left and right vaults.
In the end I was able to get something that looked ok but I would still like to refine it a bit more when I have a bit more time to work on it. I also had to fix an error I was getting on the Animation Blueprint that took about a half day to resolve but now that it is fixed I can save and compile the blueprint without it crashing every time.
The other thing I worked on last week was the damage particle system. I wasn’t able to finish it but I made a lot of progress and have a good idea on how I’m going to fix it the next time I work on it. The idea is to have the particle spread out like the death pixels but in a smaller area or “bubble”.
Things I wasn’t able to get to:
- Add dagger weapon and damage
- [Time permitting] Start on mini map for HUD
I ran into a few issues that made it so I wasn’t able to get everything done this week but I’m happy with the results I’m getting so hopefully some of the other tasks I have will be a bit faster and I can catch up some and still publish my store page in a few weeks
This Week:
- Mini map for HUD
Its a short work week so I’m only going to try and get the mini map completed using render targets and a custom visual layer for the camera capturing a top down map view
That is all for this update,
Keep dialed in for the latest!
Tony D
Cronoforge Studios Inc