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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its been a while since I update my AI conditions in this blog. My base/colony defender AI bots are ready. My food collector/defensive AI's are almost ready. I solved my major error problem this week and only a few minor adaptation to our game map issues are left. But I am still having problems with my atacking AI. I want to give them navigation points to direct them to the enemy queen in the map. To do this they must be placable for the map. I think that causes some problems. They are not following their paths, sometimes they are directly attacking me even tough they cannot see me in the first place. I have to test my ready AI's with our map and with actual food item and concentrate more on my atacking AI's.
First, sorry for the late post this week, not having classes has really affected my schedule! In this week great achivements have been made with the scaleform interface. Since last week was the first time working with it, I redesign the main menu, so now it looks more polished, as you can see in the attached image. The textures and ant image were modified using photoshop. Also the .ini files (Config files for the game) have been modified in order to make the map that host this menu the default Front End for our game. If you exit the game, it takes you back to it.
This leads us to the two remaining interfaces in the game: the new Scalefrom HUD and the food pile interface. I started with the first one, creating a completely new layout on Adobe Flash with all the necessary specifications to integrate it into the game. Each one of the labels on the HUD now contains several levels of instances in order to have a hierarchy and easy access to the parameter that will be modified via UnrealScript. The previous interface created as a test has been really useful for this step.
Once this was done, the coding started in UDK, having to create custom classes for the HUD wrapper and the HUD itself. They have been created and I'm in the process of creating the new functions and overriding the ones that need modifications in order to display the information specific to our game. A screenshot of the UI already in the game is attached; each one of the parameter is with rectangles because they are dynamic text fields define in Adobe Flash that still need to be connected in the custom classes. Also some transparency and inclination will be added in order to give it a more professional look.
I have a sketch of the remaining interface in flash already and will be connecting it shortly to UDK in order to spawn new actors from it.
With few tips, I was finally able to get the custom sound group class working for our player/team. The game can possibly have 4 sound classes. 2 classes for the two teams and other 2 for each of the queen ant.
The sound effects are almost completed. Jump, hurt, light landing, heavy landing, dead sound, slip, queen death, queen screaming, some random horrific sounds in the queen lair are some examples. Some of these sound effects are lengthier but will be reduced in future as required.
Background musics:
7 soundtracks totally, the soundtracks can be heard any where in the level. It will be randomly looped in the sound cue.
Triggers:
Trigger play their role when the player enters places like queen lair/terrain/hidden spot/finding special pickups(bigger food pickup/health). Still little work is pending on triggers since the level is ported from dec to nov 2010.
Learning how to integrate flash menus and UI with Scalefrom into UDK has been my focus this week. Since UDK provides official support only for Adobe Flash, I installed the CS4 version and managed to set it up with Scaleform.
Learning a little bit of ActionScript has been necessary in order to incorporate functionality to the buttons. First a new map was created in order to host the main menu for the game. In this map, the menu created in flash to shown once the level is loaded. The problems started once I tried to incorporate the functionality for the "Play" button. According to Unreal Developer Network , the UDK command line has to be invoked through "fscommand", so here is where we set the "open map" call. This would not work at all and after a lot of research, I found out that something has changed in UDK since the last months of the previous year. Since we already changed versions of UDK once, I did more a little bit more of research in order to find a workaround for this problem and finally did.
I had to create a new custom class, that would extend the GLX Movie Player Class (here is where the Scaleform code happens) and added to this new custom class the ability too invoke the command line by itself. So I went back to Flash and through ActionScript I send the parameters to this function, where they are executed; resulting on loading the map where the game is played. The same procedure will be utilized form the remaining parameters that need to be interchanged between this two entities.
For the next week, now the Scaleform interface is working, the main menu and the "food pile" HUD would have been created.
