Callum Pascoe - Specialist Subject Blog

I have created a weapon combo system. If the player presses the attack button 3 times they will do a series of attacks. The attack that plays will also differ depending on what mode the player is in (sword and shield/ greatsword mode). I have sped up the speed of the switching animation as I felt it was too slow before as the player was stuck still whilst watching a long animation to do so. The camera also shakes after the third blow to give it more impact, which is done by placing a notify in the animation montage. These notifies are used heavily to make the game know when the player is swinging the sword and when they are not. Without carefully placing these notifies the attacks will glitch out and play over one another. Currently the character slides backwards after the Sword and Shield combo, this is easily fixed as its simply because the animation I used is not rooted. All I need to do is get a rooted animation from mixamo, and if it doesn't have a rooted varaint I will j...

During the tutorial I am following the video asks me to use a greatsword walk animation downloaded from Mixamo. However the animation file used is not rooted, so they use the Unreal root animation function, however this adds a slight wobble to the character as he walks which looks rather silly. I know that Mixamo has an in built root function within it that works a whole lot better. This was my first time importing animations myself without using a pre-set asset file and it unfortunately went wrong. When imported the file seems to have issues with the skeleton and the end result is this warped nightmare. This was a simple issue of the model I was using used a different rig to another. I now have a weapon switch function which changes the animations of  the character as well as slowing the character down when the greatsword is equipped. 

I have yet to record my progress of the functionality of the project onto this blog. So before I proceed further into development I have documented all the features I have worked on so far. Which are showcased in this video Currently I have 2 playable characters: a ranged mage type character and a melee knight character. Each has their own abilities, the mage character can heal themselves and throw a fireball and the melee character can swing their sword once and kick. All of these abilities are governed by both the characters mana (the blue bar) and each ability also has their own separate cooldown before it can be used again, these are represented by icons at the bottom that fill up depending on if they can be used or not. Both health and mana replenish naturally over time and there are also pick-ups that the player can walk over that give instant health or mana. There is also controller support which I intend to be the main way to play. The mage character can hit the manne...

During the duration of the project my file management and organisation has become rather cluttered and difficult to keep track of. In order to stop this situation from getting too out of hand I have spent some time re-organising both the files within Unreal 4 and the asset folders. I intend on retaining this level of organisation throughout the rest of the project as I go along in order to save time. I have also imported the character blueprints and assets I produced before properly starting the project into the main project file, there were a few teething problems as there were no inputs listed within the main project file, which the character BP depended on in order to perform any of its functions like the basic attack. After some brief confusion I worked out what was going on and other than that all the characters and other things I was working on like pickups work as intended with no further alterations needed.  It has been a little too long since I last worked on the...

I have developed the block out more to establish the size of the castle as a whole with the castle walls that will contain the main explorable space with buildings and gardens within the castle walls. I have discovered an unfortunate side effect of using the Unreal geometry tool as a number of large pieces of this kind of brush mesh results in rapidly declined performance within the editor as moving objects will freeze the editor upon even the slightest of movements. This freezing is making my workflow pretty difficult and annoying. I have looked up online if this problem is on my end or an issue with Unreal and fortunately it is the latter. However, there are 2 solutions I have found online that work around this issue. One is to turn off a setting that automatically builds the geometry of a level which means that changes only take place when I build the geometry, which makes it difficult to build the level properly on the fly since I have to guess where objects will be if I move the...