Week 17 Tech stuff

The container city project has a much greater emphasis on the play-ability of the work we produce than anything we've worked on before.

So I have volunteered myself as the guy who is going to be adding in all the functionality that will make our level more engaging than just a pre-rendered set.

Having used unreal engine a little bit before in previous projects I’m really excited to be able to delve a little deeper find out how the rest of it works. I got really into lighting during the Film room project, and during the turret project we were first shown what could be achieved with blueprints. In the turret project I tried to add a little bit to the blueprint system we were given, but I didn't actually manage to achieve what I wanted.

One of the first things people do when they first start out with blueprints in unreal is make a sliding door. However our level isn't that sci-fi, while dystopian we would really like it to stay grounded in current day and even slightly older tech, as this level is almost a little taste of third world living.

The first thing I wanted to address was how the player could interact with doors in our level, I feel that star-trek whooshing doors really won’t fit.

Personally my preferred method of interacting with doors is when the character simply opens them as they are walked into. I have been playing through watchdogs recently and that’s the method they use for doors that don’t load a new level.

This system is probably very complicated for third person games if you wanted the player to actually interact with it rather than just shunt it open, however ours is first person and also only a 4 week project so simple solution is key.

I had a look at some reasonably complicated blueprint systems for opening and closing regular doors, but then I turned my attention to the physics system in UE4.

They have an actor called actor called a Physics constraint actor. It can essentially be used to bind two physics actors together. Inputting the right settings for the constraints enables the actor to be used as a hinge. So to test this out I used a placeholder door and door frame found in the example content that comes with UE4.

After a bit of tweaking the damping and angle constraints I ended up with a door system that enabled players to open doors just by walking into it, which I feel provides some quite satisfying feedback.

So the first piece of interaction is good to go in our level, roll on next week when I will be talking some of the more advanced things that we want in the level.