So with 4 weeks until judgement day and my original level design featured in the game design document being far to complex with the amount of time left to finished so with Gears of War Horde mode in mind I began my search for basic wave systems implemented into UDK in order to see if it would be feasible for me to achieve such a gameplay mechanic and as it happens I came across the below link, which contained just the kismet I was looking for.
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/750961-Help-Spawning-enemy-waves-horde
Moving forwards now I had clarified that the gameplay mechanics I desired was possible to do. Causing me to start looking at building up my game environment because of this new gameplay sequence concept I felt as if it was compulsory for me to have an environment to a fairly detailed standard.
Making my environment was purely scaled and created in 3D Studio max in order to provide me with a layout to work from. Importing wasn't as easy as planned because I had an idea that UDK would allow me to import the scene as one so I wouldn't have to allocate positions for each model but I did have to do that in the end which wasn't a massive issue. Below is a screengrab of scene in 3D Studio Max where everything was modeled and located.
You now see how it's all been made as a scene now below you can see the importation procedure into UDK when exporting models out as FBX's. All models were imported through this procedure and when texture maps are in PNG format they export as a part of the FBX format.
This process of importing models wasn't always successful as a few models refused to display faces as if the normals were flipped but I double checked them but it didn't rectify the problem so a few models didn't make it into the environment.Anyway below is a screengrab taken from UDK and Outer Edens progress displaying models in the engine.
http://prawnskunk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/cel-shading-or-borderlands-style-shader.html
This visual style was mentioned in it's earlier designs but I didn't have it in place because I was expecting it would be a lot harder to achieve but Rob Ward a fellow student pointed me towards that link.
Once all static meshes were in place the fun began with importing custom playable/AI characters and weapons into the Engine.
Firstly before importing weapons in I had my character implemented into the game engine and at this point many issues were crumbling down on me because of the way in which my character was imported into UDK with the biped as it doesn't maintain UDK's default unit scale, so the character's collision was way too tall in comparison to the mesh. This also had the same affect with custom AI, but as far as integrating custom enemies and custom player was concerned I had succeeded with the use of custom scripts that extend the preset unreal script.
Even though I had my character in it wasn't the only stage with character importation as animations had to be assigned and this done through exporting animations baked onto a biped and importing them into an animset which are directly fed into an animtree where the animations are blended together for what ever purpose is required. I had no issues with this part of character importation.Below is a screenshot of the animtree and animset.
Referring back to player collision it was sorted with cylinder collision being assigned in the script files but it isn't very accurate when shooting at enemies as you have to aim at their feet but it was a good enough fix to allow the player to walk inside the building structure
Weapon importation was the next step in this chapter of this journey which was easier than the character, but only because I obtained this piece of software that generated the weapon code for me for its importation call Unreal X-Editor. Which was obtained from the below.
http://unrealxeditor.wordpress.com/downloads/
All I had to do was rig my weapon with bones for later applying sockets for handles to be applied and muzzle flash. Below displays weapon with bones.
When I did originally import my weapon it wasn't showing in 3rd person player perspective in UDK and after desperately searching for the answer I decided to email Games Architecture Tutor Chris Walton regarding the issues and responded mention the WeaponPoint on both the character and weapon which I completely forgot about. Below displays Character and weapon in the Engine.
Next Week
At this stage I felt that little bit more comfortable with that way things were shaping, but I didn't fee complete as doors needed to be animated, enemies spawned utilizing that wave system, fan animated and a soundtrack for that extra kick needed to be embedded, but I felt like it could be left til next week that final week on this project and in fact my fourth milestone...the end is near.
- Doors
- Fan Animated
- Enemy Wave System
- Lights
No comments:
Post a Comment