Week 5 Collaborative Game Summary! (Week 26)

Unreal Blueprints & Game Building:

Continuing on from the end of last week, my main focus this week was getting the game mechanics and blueprints finished for our game so I could start making the level.  Starting off with how I was going to be able to turn the vehicle, I created a character class blueprint and copied what I'd done with the actor blueprints, but then decided to add in the basic third-person character start-up blueprints, this however was unsuccessful.  

After talking with the tutors on the situation I learned that by setting it so the mouse is viewed at the centre of the screen, by dividing the viewport size by 2 and then minus that by the mouse position will set the overall mouse position.  So when force is going along the x axis and the mouse moves left, the car moves left, and when it moves right, the car moves right.

While it was good that I got the car to move left and right by following the mouse cursor, it wasn't what I was looking for, So I went on to look up how instead of the car moving left or right through the mouse, the car and and camera both turn left and right through the mouse. This blueprint was difficult to find, most tutorials I found ended up being third-person character blueprints which when I put into the game failed to work or even run.  I consulted with the tutor about my problem, and was told that the add force blueprints keep the camera locked in one position, and would have to change it so I started off with speed rather than gaining it when going downhill.  After removing this, I learned that also the follow the mouse blueprint will be changed to make this work, and was placed at the beginning.  Next up was a branch that's condition was a boolean called controls active which basically allows the controls to work, this leads to an input vector which it's target is the character movement and will get it's world vector by having the forward vector multiplied by the speed of the character, this input goes into a controller yaw input.  After that adding a movement input for the forward and right actor vectors to have a world direction input.  Next the scale value of the actor right vector, this was achieved through getting the mouse x connecting that to normalize to range which was multiplied by another actor right vector.  This also connected to the controller yaw input by multiplying the value by the return value.

Once this blueprint was made, when the game started up it moved at the walk speed I set it to gaining no speed by going downhill, but in return allowed me to move the camera left and right as well as the car itself.  I wish I could have kept the downhill force blueprint but ultimately getting the vehicle movement was the biggest problem in the game, taking me 3 days to complete what Matt our main programmer could not in 4 weeks. 

Now that the blueprints where made it was time to make the track, because of the downhill momentum blueprint unable to work I decided to make the level layout more of a challenge for players.  First I imported the model of the track Georgia did in Maya, and correcting the auto collision I put the car in and took it for a test spin. The results are below.

(Unfortunately my laptop can no longer run this game without crashing, so from here on everything will be photos)

While it did stick to the road, there where parts where you couldn't tell what was happening, so I asked Georgia to break the track pieces down and re-send them, once that was down for whatever reason unreal wouldn't let me import the small track beings as FBX files and would crash every time I tried.  After asking around I learned that at the moment only OBJ files can be imported, so I imported them as OBJ's and annoyingly the auto collision correction button took a good 2 1/2 hours to go through all track pieces, but once done the car will be moving on the track, not above it or pushed to one side.  But with one problem solved equals another problem gained, after putting them into the scene, I discovered that because Georgia had broken her track in various places to get the pieces, she had forgotten to centre pivot each piece before she saved them.  So I needed to take them into Maya re-centre each piece, and import them back into unreal, this didn't take too long, but once again annoyingly I had to spend another 2 1/2 hours waiting for unreal to auto correct the collision boundaries on each piece.  Finally on late Thursday evening I was able to start on building the level.

On Friday I was able to finish the level design for the track and now was waiting on Georgia's buildings to add a cityscape environment, as well as everyone else's work that would be added to the game.  Still waiting for people to send me their work I added the pickup boosts and flame effects to areas of the track I thought best suited it I also added in a day/night cycle blueprint setting the night time to be the majority of the sky, this also added a unique and effect glow to the track pieces which we may leave be depending on how the colour for the track will look next week.  In the afternoon I received Georgia's building which I began to add to the game, however I was only able to do the first portion of the track due to the media labs closing early on Friday's. Next week I plan to finish the level design and hopefully have some environment backgrounds to make it look busy.  

 

Concept Art:

These pieces of work where done while waiting for the auto collision correction to finish.

To add some variety I drew these quick sketches of my vehicle designs in motion, which could also be used as reference sheets for the 3D modellers, but mainly just used to see what the cars would be like in action.

Using one of the sketches I decided to make a start menu, because I had heard nothing about anyone making a start menu, giving the car's and road a basic colour.  Next adding the building where the text would go, adding in a barrier and giving the two cars shadows and highlights.  After that creating sparks and boost effect to show some dynamic to the piece, coming after that was the background which was simply done by lowering the opacity on the road to make it long see through, and duplicating the main building and adding bright colour variations in places to show neon billboards.  Finally adding in the text on the main building chosen from the UI text piece I did last week.  Afterwards I took the piece into Unreal and adding play and quit images to act as the actual buttons which wasn't too difficult, I removed the old text box and replaced it with an image box.  For an hour's work not bad.

I started working on the level complete design where I drew out the layout of the piece, before seeing that unreal had finished all it's auto corrects, so I'm leaving this piece till after I finish the level design.

Strengths & Weaknesses:

My strengths this week where defiantly getting the main blueprints to work, and create a track for our piece, while the building environments still need to be placed I don't see that taking too long and hopefully the game will be finished by Monday or Tuesday latest.

The weaknesses is that there was so much time wasted on simple errors and the annoying auto correct took up basically an entire day.  Not to mention that the team barely turns up or contributes to the actual game work, I sent out a message on Wednesday morning urgently asking them to send me any and all work they had done by Thursday (I never received any work except for Georgia's buildings) I met Scott, the environment artist, on Thursday where I told him that I needed his environments now, he said he'd have them done that evening, then turns around and says he'll have them done by Monday or Tuesday.

The biggest problem on this project is the fact the group is never in or barely shows effort towards working on this project, at this point I can only rely on Georgia to help out.