Amenti week 6 BGP

This week I have spent the most on migrating the whole server to a git repository instead of subversion. I made this decision because there were too many problems with the subversion repository. The main problem being that a bug happened which resulted in the affected person had to delete the whole project and then download it again for it to work. After some ten repeats by different people I became fed up with how much time this took from me working on the project, so I began to research an alternative and my eyes was on git with sourcetree. The group was quiet negative against the choice of changing to sourcetree because of the problems it caused in their previous projects and also that having a local server is helping immensely with the upload and download speeds as we only have ADSL in the offices. So I looked around to see if I could find any tutorial on making a git repository on a local server. My research found that a lot of people were using bonobo git server for local hosting, which I started to install. It proved to be quiet a hassle because we hadn’t installed .NET 4.0 which required Windows Service pack 1. After installing all of the necessary programs, connecting was the only thing left. All I had to do was to access the folder where I had placed the bonobo git server and sourcetree recognized it as a git repository. All I had to do now was replicate it on all the computers from the group and then teach everyone on how to use sourcetree without accidentally deleting the whole project.

Later in the week I made a particle system that emits dust in the atmosphere to give a more realistic feeling to the rooms. This was made easy from the tutorial at udemy that I referenced in an earlier blog post where it shows how to make dust in your scene. As I’m not really literate on particles and certainly not cascade, which is Unreal Engines particle builder, I followed the tutorial and came out with a result I’m kind of happy with, but I will most definitely edit the effect to make it look better after the QA has taken a look at it.

Some particles are maybe visible in the screenshot!

Amenti week 5 BGP

Half the course is now almost done and the project is taking form. Art is starting to find its way into the game and the mechanics are pretty much done. This week was the alpha deadline and we were all working hard to make the game playable with an easy progression through the game.

New Blueprint

But first I fixed a blueprint so that we could use it more dynamically. The blueprint used to only be able to move a Pillar_BP reference to a position in the world when you were standing on a Horus_Eye_BP. We made it like this because we only planned for one perspective puzzle but after the alpha-playtest the players wanted more perspective elements in the puzzles so that meant that the script was pretty hard to use in other situations than the first. Instead of having references to objects in the blueprint I made it so that it used actors. An actor is an object in Unreal Engine that you can add components to or add scripts etc. to make them do things. Almost everything in our project is Actors, so this change made the script able to move any object in the game. I also made the option to either teleport or move the object gradually. This because the puzzles works differently from each other, so now we could choose how the object moves to the target. The puzzles are perspective oriented which means the player has to look in a specific direction, so I added the possibility to look at whatever object you want to to activate the movement of the object.

This week I also made the texture on the arm to change texture on trigger which transitions the texture into a burnt hand texture. This to make the player get feedback that feels somewhat realistic when he/she sets the characters hand on fire. The outcome turned out to be quite nice, but it is not final.

Amenti BGP week 4

One week until the alfa deadline and the project is going forward. This week I did a lot of work on the server so that every team member had access to the project.  The problems that I encountered was mostly about connecting SVN to source control in Unreal Engine. I put down about 6 hours only on trying to make the server work. This because of the magical land of computers where a thing that works on one computer doesn’t work on any other computer. Sometimes, for best feeling in the stomach, it works on all computers but one and it is also errors you have never seen before or there is no documentation on how to fix the errors. When you finally find someone with the same problem as you, the post was made 2010 and there is no answer to be seen. The solution was found when doing the same thing I had been trying to do for the whole day, which was to connect to the repository and link it to source control, but now it worked for some reason. Now everyone could finally work together in the same project and push their own work onto the levels.

The concept art for the Anubis rooms

I also worked on white boxing the Anubis level. This was based on the concept art skiss that our lead designer made. I used the geometry brush in Unreal to make the boxes and stairs. This tool makes it really easy and quick to test the scale and placement of objects in a level. I could test the placement of the “moving stairs” part that was supposed to be in the level. It consists of a set of stairs that is supposed to move into place when the player looks at a specific point in the level. I could test where that point was best placed and also where the player is going to stand when looking at said point.  I also tested the placement of the torches so that the player could not skip parts of the puzzle but had to complete it in an almost specific order and also so that it did not feel impossible to complete.

The white boxed Anubis level