Some Quick WIP stuff

Haven't worked a ton on the UDK with Ren comming up etc, so I thought I'd share what I did do.

First off I learned what kismet and matinee are and a little of how to use them, that combined with the vocal powers of Mike and Ren produced this:



Another thing to note is that is that I found the CustomTimeDilation actor property ^_^ so I made a gun that puts up forcefields which slow the projectiles to a crawl, then when you alt fire they all go back to normal.

Secondly I've been idly creating some weapons, I was going to have a kunai and a fireball, but the fireball ended up getting a little out of hand ^_^



This shows off some other stuff, like getting character animations working (albeit a bit crap) and a weapon that correctly uses the arms meshes in tandem with the weapon. This was something that I wanted to get working entirely before I did a tutorial to make sure that I knew the ins and outs.

Also thanks to the kunai's melee attack I'm using traces etc for collision.

So that's one thing checked off the list, and two halfs of things ^_^

Next up is to finish (and slightly balance) the weapons a bit more so we can have another multiplayer session, then do the arms tutorial, then start working on a little self contained project, nothing too big, something doable within a week methinks. When I start that I'll create that new enemy and tick that off my list too ^_^

I have things, soon to share !

Progress ! Sweet progress ^_^ Also I've got Mike and Matt into the UDK which means that we're all gonna become fucking pimp-wizards together.

So what have I learnt? After a good amount of rubbing my face all over the UDK source code and internet I've got a number of the things that I wanted to understand understood. I now "get" pawn animations along with a decent understanding of AnimationTrees, plus how to get the first person character specific hands that come along with the UDK Liam model ingame and working. I'm gonna record a tutorial soon as it's something that I had to dig for.

That's a hand ! A Robot hand of my robot character ^_^ It might not look it but this pic represents a lot of win for me especially considering that I was trying to tackle things at an odd angle. For some reason I'm determined to learn the tools to make a fully functioning custom main character, so that includes things like importing custom 3d models, custom 3rd person and 1st person animations.

For the most part I have all those pieces working, now I need to put them together and hope they don't break ^_^

I've also been playing around with APEX destructables which are fun if not a very unfinished feature, not being able to set mass is a good example of something huge missing.

When I got too frustrated with figuring out that stuff I took a break and learnt a few other things + did some light 3d modelling/rigging. I've been trying to rig a frickin' awesome model of Fei Long that was ripped from SSFV but I've never done any proper rigging so it's hard ^_^ For the most part I have it working but his hand's skin weight is a mess. The good news is that the udk imported the skeletal mesh + materials no problem (including bump map) so he looked awesome ingame ! He's rigged to the default UDK skele too so he can use all the default animations, but the skinning isn't finished so it spazzes out every now and then :(

I modeled a crap flat in half an hour ! Here it is in all it's basic semi textured glory. The next thing that I model I'm going to put everything I have into it and stop hiding behind how little time I spend on it ^_^ I used to be "not totally newbie" at modelling stuff and I'd like to get better than I was. I think I'll put aside a whole day soon and model something.

Also I'm noticing the lighting seems a little off on some of the triangles underneath the windows, any idea how to prevent that?

What else... Oh I watched the tuts on soft body and cloth simulation so that's added to my bag o tricks ^_^ Plus I spent an hour today getting the hoverboard ingame and I'd like to release a tutorial on that too (the old ones no longer work) plus explain why you have to do certain things to get it ingame.

Also I've started to take a proper look at how the pawns plus controllers work, starting out with writing my own basic enemy, which lead to this:




At the moment it's very simple stuff, making them move toward me a little then making them go into ragdoll mode briefly.

One thing I am noticing is that in UTDeathmatch the bots are accessing the SQUAD variable lots and comming up with an exception:

ScriptWarning: Accessed None 'Squad'
SSEnemyController DM-Test.TheWorld:PersistentLevel.SSEnemyController_1
Function UTGame.UTBot:HearNoise:020E

This isn't just in HearNoise either. I need to figure out if assigning a default squad is the right solution or simply overriding the functions is a better bet as I bet the exceptions are eating into the performance and I'd like to know how many of these I can get running around the game.

So what's next?

• Release a firstperson arms tutorial
• Learn more about the pawns/controllers + make something cool
• Learn another random part of the UDK
• Create a new enemy including : New model, new skeleton, new animations, new animtree, new AI

This post marks the start of me getting closer to obtaining the rank of "Not totally crap" at the UDK.

*Raises glass*

TO PROGRESS!