Tech Build

It's been a while since our last post. We've been trying to get a fully playable build ready for the hand in. Rob Strachan kindly put together a paintgun for us and helped us out with some UTScritps. We've tried to create a small area that demonstrates the ink running mechanic. We were hoping we could get it working by using Kismet scripting. Sadly there are just way too many problems when trying to script it in Kismet.

We have managed to make a build that plays reasonably well and really demonstrates how we want our mechanic to work.


Here's a section of our Kismet setup
We really wanted to have animated decals in the build, however we started getting some weird performance issues when using a movie texture. We shot a separate video to show how we wanted them to work.



We've recently started testing out FlipBook textures as an alternative. These might be more restrictive in terms of frame numbers but they shouldn't affect the game's performance.

Decal Uncovering

Trying to get the images to uncover while being masked by the ink you lay was a tad harder that we initially thought. After a whole lot of tinkering we finally have something that works pretty well.


This is the material setup we're using for the decal

Jumping - Solved!

After two days of solidly toiling away and a whole ton of different kismet setups we finally managed to implement jumping into the build. You can see from the video the player can now jump onto a blank patch and land producing a big splat of ink. The player is then trapped within the ink splat until they shoot out a new line of ink. The falling damage and damage indicator should be disabled in the final build :)

Whitebox

We finally have something moving in engine! Sadly we had to use black ink as the coloured ink has some ugly blending issues that we're still trying to work out. This is our very very very first whtiebox test so there's still a whole lot of doodads that need working out.


We also have animated decals up and running (literally) in engine.

Engine tests

Last week we downloaded UDK and started testing things out in engine. Currently focusing on getting animated decals to work and figuring out the best way to light up our city. Currently we think baking an ambient pass in Maya and letting Unreal handle the directional light seems to be the strongest way to go. The two shots here show the same house, one with a standard grey unreal material and the other with an ambient occlusion bake.



Getting the decals to animate has been fairly straightforward so far (after the initial confusion about getting material instances to trigger properly). Using movie textures seems to be the best way to go about it, and although there are a few annoying little problems with this, it shouldn’t be too hard to fix.