Back on track, and a bit of a lull

So you may have noticed my updates have slowed somewhat, it's been a weird and emotional few weeks, I've been a bit slow on development at the moment.

I'm happy to say most of the basics are in, over the next 2 weeks I'm looking to get weapons and a basic menu as well as respawning.

Due to not being your average shooter I was considering instead having a 'defeated' player, be disengaged, they have so many seconds to find a safe respawn point, while 'dead' the player runs faster but cannot fire, take damage, or carry flags, respawning does damage in a small area to opposed players and instantly recharges the player shield, energy and health.

I'm not 100% sure how well this system will work yet. So it'll have to be tested and tweaked.

As for this week, health and shield damage, as well as shield regen is functioning at the moment, a temporary HUD is in place and works quite well, and the players can fire currently rudimentary projectiles that inflict damage, though damage bonuses/negatives based on accuracy are not 100% functional.

Next update should be in 1-2 weeks (at the moment it's slow progress) and will have images, and perhaps some video footage, who knows.

So it's been a rough couple of weeks

Between hard drive crashes, loss of progress, personal troubles and just plain shitiness it's been a rough few weeks, at the moment though, I'm happy to say that I got through it and got some progress to show in the next few days.

Setbacks

Unfortunately my PC has been wiped again, as I'd only just reinstalled, I'd forgotten to actually backup any of my work via dropbox and the likes and now, am a little angry to say the least, however, keeping a blog up means I can quickly redo the work I'd done previously. But still, somewhat annoying.

Shielding Progress

On top of the barriers I built recently I've added a shield generator to them, while the shield is up any shots will damage it, if the shield is destroyed the barrier will be passable and any rounds will move through it as empty space.

The current state of a barrier is visible by its material.

A shield at full capacity

A fully charged shield is green and will slowly pulse.

A shield at 0 capacity

A damaged shield will blend from green to red and will flash more rapdily. A shield at 0 capacity will be invisible until it begins its recharge. I will be adding a particle effect for the shield 'break' in the future as well as balancing recharge delays, rates and overall shield health.

Torn

When I first conceived the project, I was aiming for a very military/cyber-punk style, main inspirations being along the lines of Ghost in the Shell, big bleak cities, a focus on special ops group and awesome looking vehicles.

That style quickly changed, I get a bit tired with the ongoing 'realistic' looking games and frankly I wanted to try something different, the Unreal Engine does some wonderful things with lighting and so I wanted to exploit that, in the end I decided on a more cyber-goth inspired style, still heavy and dark, but with neon highlights.

I decided on a fairly basic story to match, in the future Augmented Reality training sims have become common, these sims were a well kept secret at first, but as with all software it was eventually leaked, cracked and adjusted by many online black market operators.

One of these operators is the Archangel network, instead of nefarious means they took a more relaxed approach, releasing the program as an extremely adjusted module that quickly caught on as an urban sport among several groups (and more than one military squadron), while the military does not officially support the use of their technology curbing the spread of modified versions has proven difficult and extra curricular activities for the troops is always considered welcome.

Now here's where the issue arises.

A Conflict of Interest

First, I'll state, the new style I went for, the dark meets neon cybergoth rave look, works out quite well and offers a unique style, at the same time I love the visuals of the military of the sketches I did early on in the project when it was still an idea for a military shooter.

Obviously with the ability to customise the player character this leaves some flexibility, so I can still use the designs I've scratched out, however going forward I'll need to be much more careful with designs, now it's striking a comfortable balance, with the neon lights of the avatars and neo-tokyo, and the cold pragmatism of military armours and hardware. As I go forward I plan to include more styles and add more variety to the avatars.

On goals

Goals are important

they allow for a target, timescale, and endless despair when something goes wrong. One of my first goals is to establish goals, notably, every month or two I like to outline what I'd like to have done and how important it is, for the last month, the goal was simple, something along the lines of "players" with a second goal of "players that work".

I can happily announce with some free time, I achieved the second one, simply put I wanted to be able to get a few players in the game, spawning, moving and visible to each other, while there's no meshes on the players yet, it's already possible to see multiple capsules charging about with little to no real interaction.

But they're there, and that's a start.

Normally I'd go into quite the bit of detail with the goals and dates for finishing, but as this is a project that mostly happens in my free time, I instead tend to list 'priorities' and a timescale.

So here's the current list.

Goals for June/July

-Priority 1

• Aiming
• Weapon 'slots' and information
• Dropped weapons
• Projectile spawning

-Priority 2 (done at a stretch)

• Character model
• Modular character setup
• Some animation
• A few weapons

-Priority 3 (probably next month)

• Character abilities
• Character health
• Weapon 'skins'

These are then sorted into two separate list, anything important to gameplay either visually or mechanically (such as aiming or a character model) is considered more important than something that perhaps isn't as important (like a weapon skin).

More images, doodles and thought coming soon.

Also trying to find a decent screen capture software to show off what I have so far, as simplistic as it may be.

Achievement in Construction I - Railings and railing like objects

Today I took a little time to experiment with the construction script, the game will utilise a lot of barriers as a form of cover utilised by the player, these barriers are re-enforced by the war game augmented reality and can be temporarily disabled by players and their weapons.

Immediately it's obvious, creating a large number of barriers for different lengths, the correct length shield re-enforcement and hooking each one up in the blueprint editor is time consuming, especially for a one man team, a big plus of Unreal Engine 4 however is generation of assets using the construction script.

The best way to start off with the barrier, is by creating assets that can be used for their creation, for now I've kept it simple, an end segment and a mid segment, the blueprint takes these and uses them for creation of a larger barrier.

A mid and end segment for a simple railing, for now my
assets are fairly rough, lacking in detail or texturing,
mainly used for the test environment

Once I have these assets the next step is to set-up a blueprint, all of the asset creation is handled through the input panel using some basic properties. As I wanted to keep this construction as modular as possible I kept the input flexible but simple, the input requires a few items.

End/Mid Mesh - Input to select the meshes that end/make up the railing
Segment Length - The length of an individual mid segment
Segment Count - The total number of segments that make up the railing
Textures - Used to set the texture for each segment allowing a little more variety

The inputs are simple, but offer lots of potential variation,
the only real limits being pivot placement must be the same
for generation reasons.

With the inputs complete the next step is to test it out and see if it works, in this case, dropping it in, selecting the correct meshes and tweaking some of the parameters, obviously adjusting the Rail Segment Length causes issues, such as gaps and overlapping meshes, tweaking the Rail Segments however produces the desired effects.

Above, a rail with 6 segments that covers the entirety of the edge, below, the exact same rail with only 3 segments
as shown, it is much shorter, covering a smaller section of the ledge.

Immediately we can see the segments variable correctly adjusts the number of rail segments used, the asset in the above images is the exact same blueprint, with an adjustment to the variable, the mesh updates in real-time within the engine, as soon as the inputs change the engine re-builds the mesh using the construction script within the blueprint.

Now the obvious issue is that this particular rail doesn't look like it offers much protection in the war games, and you'd be right, so the next step is to add shield barricades.