Callum Pascoe - Specialist Subject Blog

The HUD widget in Unreal 4 is versatile allowing you to quickly make bars and meters that are controlled by scripts in an understandable manner. Customising the look of these bars and meters is also easy. Allowing you to set empty and full states by inserting images of the respective different states which the engine will then use these as a reference to fill the bar or meter up. You can also adjust how the bar fills up with the bar fill type. These HUD elements can also be moved around freely at any point. The Hud widget also supports animation allowing images and texts to have motion keyframed in such as text flying upward and fading slowly out.

After returning to my project after a brief break from Blueprinting I have realised just how messy the blueprints of my project have gotten. As a result I have combed through my Blueprints and used the reroute node to make it easier to read and edit as need be. Like the overall file management clean up I did in December I will be attempting to keep this level of order throughout the project to avoid wasted time.

Game Engines serve as the core foundation of a game. The engine handles the interfacing with the hardware it is running on, how to receive input from controller hardware, holds files all different kinds and sizes, allows 3D to be drawn into the world, recreates physics and allows the programming to interact with the game. Most AAA publishers have their own in-house engine(s) specifically built for the type of games they make. No engine is built the same with their own nuanced technical proficiencies and weaknesses. DICEs Frostbite engine was built mainly for large scale high fidelity FPS multiplayer games but struggled when tasked with creating an RPG game in the form of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda as the engine was not built with the tools to support the mechanics and logic of that genre and the developers had to spend a lot of time creating these basic systems from scratch. Creating a good 3D engine from scratch is a herculean task requiring a vast a...

RE Engine is Capcoms proprietary game engine originally built for Resident Evil 7. Games engines usually result in a trade-off between visuals and game performance as high-fidelity visuals typically use a greater amount of hardware’s performance resources such as the CPU and GPU with the usage of these resources usually proportional to the quality of the visuals and scope of the game. One of the aspects of a game engines utility is to optimise the techniques they use to minimise the hardware resources used by the game functions and visuals. The RE Engine currently supports 3 of the core platforms, PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Resident Evil 7 has PlayStation VR support for PlayStation 4. High frame rates for VR is a must to prevent the player from feeling motion sick, reaching high frame rates with high fidelity photorealistic visuals is fairly difficult on consoles due to their restricted old hardware. This is where the RE Engine seems to excel with Resident Evil featuring high fidelity ...