Gameplay / UI - Kismet Node Creation and Integration Weeks

This post will be the last one that I made in the blog and contains the activities in which I took part during the last two weeks.

Mert and I worked on the creation of some Kismet nodes that he needed in order to work with some arrays for the AI of the bots. I created 3 different version of the nodes in around the three days that we spend working on it. At the end we were not able to integrate the results into Mert's Kismet scripts, but we did try our best!

Next, integration started. I had several problems with it, especially with Mert's AI. Also I did Karthik's sound integration, managing to create the needed 3 classes in order to do it. At the end, most of the time went into bug fixing with Mert and at the end, we managed to fix most of them, leaving just some minor ones in the game.

Tough decisions had to be made at the ending, like having not to include the ant that Craig sent us, since we had some problems with the animations at the end. The Queen is included in the game, but still it does not behave in the expected way. I think with a little bit more time, we would have been able to fix most of this errors, but a deadline had to be met!

The video below shows some of my features during the integration progress in one of the last builds of the level. Also a picture of the final version of the main menu is attached, since UDK would refuse at the end to update it, ant the game was compiled with the previous one.

The game was finally submitted yesterday with most of my features included.

WEEK 17 - Level Designing

MAY 15 - MAY 21

Removed all the bugs and made testing over and over again to make changes. Yet again, Tyler helped me by just playing(how weird).

Now looking at the intelligent members of my groups, in cooking the game.

Gameplay / UI Weekly Update - Food Pile HUD

This week I finally got the food pile HUD working. You can spawn bots, heal yourself or the queen. The amount of food will be discounted from the colony reserve. The HUD shows in screen once you activate the trigger in the food pile (with the e key) and show on top of the screen, with the alpha channel set to 60%, so it has transparency. The control is removed from the pawn and now controls the cursor in the HUD and by pressing the "Exit" button, the HUD disappears and the control is returned to the pawn.

The normal HUD used to disappear when the food pile HUD was displayed, but once I got the team feedback, it was decided to keep the two at the same time. That's why the "Food Reserve" field in the food pile HUD has been deactivated (It shows "000").

The only thing remaining in to the integration of all this features with the other ones. I'll keep updated on this. Here's a picture of the food pile HUD, since fraps is crashing and doesn't let me capture the video.

Sound log 7

Sound triggers

It is quite interesting to have a sound triggers in the level but its is more interesting when player has a dynamic environment throughout the game. Since we have the gameplay as deathmatch the importance of triggers are ruled out a little.

We have decided to have a couple of triggers for learning purpose. One in the queen lair and the other at the center of the terrain.

The World Thus Far

Sorry for not posting in forever. Always trying to get one more feature in to show off and I end up never updating. Just like real developers.

Well, we now have a beautiful looking world for the outdoor portion of the level. Lots of green grass walls break up the playing field into more managable paths for the player to choose from. It starts to look a little more like what you'd expect and ant to see.

That grass be tall!



You may also notice that I managed to switch the crosshair to be a new one that I made in Photoshop. The bite weapon also has a new crosshair.

This is the view as you walk out of one of the colony exits.



All throughout the field, there are many smaller trenches for you to duck into for extra cover. Or brave staying up top for a faster trip to the enemy's lair.

Go under that suspicious looking bridge, or just run for it?

Off on the sides, you can get really walled off from the middle portion, allowing you to focus on what's in front of you.

There could be an enemy ahead, but we can't tell because this stupid rock is in our way.

And finally, in the very middle is an open brawling area. It has two hills on either side for you to charge over and into the brawl, but that leaves you exposed. The other option is to sneak through the thick grass surrounding that area. You'll be better covered, but you'll have a harder time seeing what's going on in the middle.

Is anyone there?

Well, all of that is good and everything, but what about getting rid of that dang default robot model and getting some ants in here? Well, wait no more! I've gotten our ant in. Here's a video I made showing a little more of how the outside looks, how the weapons sound, the background music, and the ant! Unfortunatly, there's a few problems, but we'll worry about those later.

Well, isn't he the friendly sort?

So, obviously, the animation set is not configured correctly. I should be able to fix that on my own tomorrow, there's just a lot of settings and I probably goofed one of them somewhere. So for the moment, he's a floater. Also, he uses the default UDK gun at the moment, but he won't in the final game. And, if he does get his hands on a gun, he won't be firing it from his face.

So, I'm going to try and get better about updating on a regular basis and keep you guys informed. Until then.

AI

My food collector/defensive AI's are ready like my base/colony defender AI bots. They are doing what they are suppose to do. Also respawning issue is also solved. So that when they die, they will be revived after some time like 15 seconds which can be changed. Also when the bots die, they got into a stack so that they are not going to spawn at the same time. So with stack, each same type bot will be spawn after waiting 15 seconds from the previous bot spawning time because spawning 5 food collector/defensive bots is not going to be fair for other team.
I am still working on my attacking AI. The fath problems seems to be solved. They are following their paths when no one is around.

Gameplay / UI Weekly Update - Working Scaleform HUD

This week the HUD is fully working!! It took more time than expected because the classes that I mentioned on the last post (MinimapHUD and HUDWrapper) that I was extending, had to be created completely from scratch; since removing and/or using its methods for our custom game was creating to much warnings in the code.

Functions for setting the initial values for all the parameters in the HUD have been created, along with all the "ticking" functions for each one of them. The Queen's health has a especial function, since it is a "placeable" class. Kismet action sequences had to be created in order to keep track of her health and reflect it on the screen.

Validations have been added into the game too. For example, now the game is not limited to only one food pile per team and also a check is made before the food is deposited, in order to allow only members of the corresponding team to deposit on it.

The only field that has not been programmed yet is the weapon name, since the weapons name are not defined yet and I need to set the text field to have a specific number of letters as the maximum.

The coding on the food pile HUD is being done right now.