Week 22: A Quick Week

Progress on the Project

Aaaaand woosh! Another week has passed. I feel like it wrote my last blog post just yesterday. Our level is progressing along nicely and we are slowly filling in the missing gaps with more and more assets. I was focussing on completing the fountain puzzle this week by implementing the checkpoint system. You can now return up onto the middle platform of the fountain once you've reached that point in case you ever fall down, which will make it a lot easier for people to complete the puzzle without getting too frustrated about it.

Another new addition this week was UMG. The Unreal Motion Graphics UI Designer is a great tool within UE4, that can help the user create a working UI without too much hassle. I used it to create text's within our level that notify the player of when he reached the checkpoint. It will also outline the key the player needs to press in order to return to the checkpoint once they fall down. In addition to that I also ported over my old HUD, which I used for switching between the worlds, since it was much less complex this way.

UMG UI Designer

I did encounter one problem while using UMG and that was the fact that, although you could have a tick event within a UMG widget, you couldn't run more than 1 line of nodes at the same time. Sequences didn't work and neither did custom events. In the end I had to resort to creating a single UMG widget for every bit of text that I wanted to appear on screen. Maybe not the best solution, but still a lot less complex than my previous HUD.

Apart from that not much has happened unfortunately. The week went by so fast that I didn't get around to doing a lot of other things. I did mess around with the water a bit and came up with yet another water shader, which I am quite pleased with, however there is a slight problem, since it is practically invisible when viewed from below the surface, meaning that once you enter the water the water surface disappears, leaving you feeling like you're floating or something. So far I have failed to find a work around for that...

Next Week:

Looking ahead I am starting on the next puzzle now, which I will focus on during the next week. Currently we are planning on having a puzzle within the tea party area. This will require the player to set the table by picking up objects and bringing them to the table within a certain time limit. So far I have touched this briefly, by creating a particle effect for fireflies, since our tea party area (within the other dimension) is quite dark and I found that you could barely make out anything on the table. I also have previously worked on creating the possibility for players to pick up physics items and carry them, which will take away a lot of the scripting that I need for this puzzle.

Glowing insects? Awesome!

I will aim to get the puzzle done by the end of the week. Stay tuned~

Oh and yeah, Unreal Engine 4.7 has been released and it's amazing! ( https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-47-released )  We previously had some problems with foliage shading within unreal, but that problem has finally been fixed and the foliage is looking better than ever! Yaaaay!!