Callum Pascoe - Specialist Subject Blog

For another project I have been working on a Main Menu and pause menu, both of which could be implemented into my Subject Specialism. Much like the HUD system I currently have these menus make use of the widget system. Setting these features up was a little easier than I expected with the ability to click on menu elements to activate sub menus and basic functions of quitting and pausing the game being simple blueprint actions. I also added a post process component to be added to the screen upon the game being paused. This chromatic aberration effect will disappear once the game has resumed play. This is all done via and "Add Post Process Component" node that is called in the custom function I added called "Pause Game" when "Set Game Paused" is set to true. This post process component allows me to add a bevy of different effects, from lens effects, blur, colour grading and much more all at once with a great deal of control on how they work. This cur...

Whilst wind physics work very well for simulating cloth blowing in the wind it wouldn’t be very performance efficient for small objects in large quantities such as grass. As a result, Unreal has a simple grass wind node on its material editor that you can attach to the world position offset that fakes wind simulation by animating the grass swaying from side to side. Since this is an automated process it means that the developer does not have to individually key frame the animation which I imagine would require a skeletal mesh, which would be harmful to performance neither does the developer need to worry about making sure the animation look natural enough. The tool has enough variables to capture different wind conditions as well, you can recreate a gentle breeze or large gales depending on what values it’s fed. Overall this tool is easy to use and saves time and performance resources. I will almost certainly be using it for my project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkAU3A5nM-E Project Borealis is a Half-Life fan game with the intention of creating a game that follows the leaked script of Half-Life 3. Half – Life 2 and its episodes were originally developed on Valves Source engine but the developers of Project: Borealis are developing the game with Unreal 4. However, they still want to recapture as much of the feel, physics and intricacies of the original game as much as possible to make it feel like a true follow up to the original title. Recapturing the feel and physics of a different engine within another is quite difficult and I imagine that the development team have spent a great deal of time tweaking various movement speed and gravity modifiers to recapture the feel of Half – Life 2. This update video is showing the progress of this endeavour using a testing room which most games in development use to test out basic features and make sure they work as intended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShJP0oyrJrg This fan project aims to recreate the flow and mechanics of the combat from the popular game series: Dark Souls. The player can lock the camera onto the enemy boss to keep track of them. A health bar also appears above the boss’s head indicating how much health they have. This health bar follows the boss as they move around. Each attack drains the player performs drains the stamina bar which governs when the player can attack. When an attack lands a blood particle effect spurts out of the enemy based on what location the player hit. Some games will have the particle effect come out of the sword as it saves the time it would take to create the system where the particles spawn where the player hits. If I were to recreate this system I would have multiple collision meshes on certain points of the character, lower leg, thighs, chest etc that would spawn an emitter on certain parts of the skeletal mesh using the when actor overlap...