Week 25: Breakages and Aspirations

An Eventful Ending

The Easter break is finally here and with it we say goodbye to the last major term of this year. After the holidays we are back for another 2 weeks before the hand-in of our last project and then we get to work on own projects while our work is being marked for this year. Actually no, that is not quite true, because we actually found out this week that we will be getting an additional 2 weeks to finish-off our Alice In Wonderland project. Wohoo!

Although we were doing pretty well up to this point and I feel like this project is the first group project that I have done this year where not everything has gone completely wrong, we did have a couple of down moments throughout working on our Off The Map Competition entry. This was usually minor things, which only really seemed pretty major at the time, but were easily solved within a couple of hours. This time, we had a bit more of a major problem though!

Group work is super-awesome! (Well, sometimes.)

I had been working throughout Monday and Tuesday to implement a new mechanic into our level: Level Streaming! This would allow us to load levels faster and easier and also have animated loading screens instead of a frozen image with text. Awesome! However, this was also the first time we used this new system and it meant that we had to get used to switching between levels within the editor and having all the other levels be visible on the screen at the same time. This could get confusing, for example if we were to place an object within the dark world, but forgot to actually switch to that level and still have the normal world set as the active level. Once we would then unload the normal world, the object that we just placed would disappear with it, no matter if it was actually placed inside the normal world or the dark world.

In the end it turned out that this way of working (while it worked great for us) was just bad practice though and we faced a massive problem with our landscape completely breaking and causing the engine to crash everytime we tried to edit it. This was a major problem as Anya took over the engine from me to place a lot of foliage into the level and populate everything and the foliage she painted was bound to the landscape. Replacing the landscape with a new landscape would therefore mean that we would lose all of our foliage and that would've been quite a big impact on our progress. So we tried to solve the issue and I went into contact with an employee at Epic Games (the developers of the unreal engine) who tried to assist me by taking a look at the level. In the end it turned out that the only solution for this problem was to switch directly into the level we were editing, rather than using the level streaming within the editor. It took us a whole day to figure this out, but at least in the end we managed to save our project. Phew!

An engine crash! Oh wait.. wrong engine.

Technical Artist?

Furthermore, we had our formal reviews this week. Funnily enough I was actually looking at internships at different companies on the day before and discovered a position for a Technical Artist Intern at Ubisoft in Newcastle. I had a browse through and pretty much decided that becoming a technical artist would probably best suit me. Combining modelling and texturing with scripting is something that I personally feel like is interesting and it almost seems that it is pretty much what I am doing on this project right now already and what I have done on the project before. When I came into my review I was promptly told by my tutor that a technical artist is what I've been put down for as well. So clearly, this is where I am going, which is great!

I finally feel like I have something to aim for. So far I was always quite unsure of what to do, but it seems like I have found my goal and now I can focus on getting where I want to be. One of the things that stood out to me were the fact that I needed to have good knowledge of scripted language such as Max Script and Python for the internship at Ubisoft, which is something I have yet to look into. I am fairly confident when it comes to scripting, but I have not yet had the patience to sit through and actually learn a particular language. I know bits and bobs when it comes to PHP and back when I was playing a lot of Garry's Mod, I learned scripting from scratch using a made-up language known as "Expression 2" (http://wiki.wiremod.com/wiki/Expression_2) within an addon called "wiremod", so I am fairly confident that it should not be too hard for me to pick up on Max Script or Python. However, for now I will concentrate on getting our current project done.

Easter Holidays!

I am aiming to keep posting on my blog over easter, since I have quite a bit of work to do for out project. Most of the asthetics are done now, but I have yet to create many cutscenes and puzzles. We went over this during the beginning of the week and I have made a nice big list of stuff that I need to do. I am quite confident that I will get everything done though and if not, then I still have 4 weeks to finish it off after Easter and most importantly several months until the final hand-in for the actual competition. So I should be fine.

Stay tuned~