Easter Egg

I have added a little bit of an easter egg to my level, which is a small room showing some of my other college work. The room has all the art on the walls, I just need to make the interactive element to them.

Note: This room is hidden, so anyone who sees this blog entry will know where to look for it. The wall just before the forcefield is destroyable.

Scripting Problems!

Lets get the good news over with first shall we. My blog entries are now up to date, so I'll probably have this available to view at the show as a developers diary.

Right, on to the main reason for this entry, which if you haven't guessed, is about scripting for UDK. Scripting is the reason I haven't made the level any bigger and is also the reason why there might not be any custom characters. I'm not a programmer at heart, but I understand the benefits it can have to the artist with an understanding of it.

I have been able to create a third person camera, but in the process of learning about custom classes I managed to break just about everything else. Fortunately I managed to fix most of the problems and the level is playable (without enemies).

The problems that I'm left with however are causing me to go grey. If this keeps up my hair will be comparable to Mr. Fantastic's from The Fantastic 4.

There are a couple of minor aspects to do with weapons firing, but these are passable. The major issues are with the user interface side of things. The HUD still needs changing and the Pause Menu still doesn't Resume game. Dying in game is also a bit of a problem.

So far today I've been arguing with the Pawn classes, trying to get some of the UTPawn scripts working in my GSPawn script. This managed to fix some things while breaking others for no apparent reason.

I'll just have to move on to the UI aspects for now.

End of Year Show Preparations

I've been heavily involved in the organisation of the show so far, organising the music to be played, marketing and trying to encourage people to take part.

On Thursday and Friday I put my project work on hold in order to start decorating the room where the show is being held. A small group of us played popular painting games like 'Don't step on the Carpet' and 'That's my paint brush, get your own'.

There's still a little left to do, but we should have it all ready by the end of Tuesday.

Now that I'm making this post, I should probably include more details on where and when the show is taking place.

City College Brighton & Hove
TRG-15, Trafalgar Building
Pelham Street
Brighton
BN1 4FA
01273 667788

The show is being held from Friday 10th June to Thursday 16th June (not including Sunday), between 9am and 5pm.

Third Person Camera Revised

The camera had a complete overhaul to get it to work properly. My camera class has become obsolete, as all of the camera functions are now in my Pawn class.

The movement of the camera has also been dramaticaly improved, the camera no longer focuses on the back of your head when up against a wall. Instead it now changes to a first person view point (as seen in the images above).

Again this is thanks to the tutorials on Allar's Awesome Blog.

Fractured Meshes & Extra Detail

The level I'm creating is very small, so I want it to be as detailed as possible. For this I am using various Static Meshes.

Some of the meshes have been converted into Fractured Meshes to add more of an interactive element to the gameplay (plus it's always fun to break things). It also makes it possible to add secret areas...

The image above shows me demonstrating on one of the fractured meshes.

Weapons Revised

As I said before, I'm having a bit of trouble with the weapons in UDK. As a result I've decided to try and use the default scripts for them as much as possible.

So far I've managed to get the gun to fire, and the primary function is even visible. As with everything there is a problem. I need to look up how to offset where the gun fires from, as at the moment it fires from in front of the character's chest.

I'm happy that the gun fires at least, so I'll move onto more important aspects of the build and come back to this later.

ForceField & Cinematic

As you can see in the image above, I managed to create a forcefield for my level. This was achieved by following a very good video tutorial (several parts).

This is what part of it looks like in Kismet.

The switch is now in place and has an extra texture layer on it which gives it an intermittent glow (to let players know that they can interact with it).

I've also created my first cinematic scene in UDK for this (mainly because it doesn't rely on any particular character being present). When a player hits the switch, the camera zooms out and then changes to a view of the forcefield, which in turns disappears.

As a final touch I added an interact icon for when the player approaches the switch.