Archive:
Added a post process material that renders the character’s silhouette if it’s occluded. It’s a quality of life improvement that, I hope, will help people when the game’s in isometric mode. I wish I’d made it for original game, tbh.
Also added a new Camera Origin for vertical movement, and messed about, texturing the second room.
“I know, I’ll make a button that spawns a duck…”
What actually happened: I fell down the rabbit hole of making “The One True Switch And Switch Responder” plugin.
I’m not finished yet.
Yup. Still not finished. But I have toggle switches; solo and chainable, interactable via thrown objects or joypad button presses. Pressure switches should come fairly quickly. When I need them.
As this is the first thing I’ve implemented that’ll kick off a cut-scene, I had to add code to lock the player, lock the camera, spawn Level Sequence Actors – timelines that let you control everything in the world like a single animation – and begin playing them. There’s a nice screen-fade post-process effect (a circular wipe, like Super Mario World) that’s currently tied into map loading, that should also work when I transition in and out of sequences.
Oh, and look who’s back…
My button still isn’t spawning a duck.
But! I thought it’d be cool to add a new type of Duck; one you have to carry to the exit, and for extra lols, while you’re carrying it, you can’t jump. (I’m also tempted to add moving Ducks, that you have to chase. Kinda like the renegade orbs in Crackdown 2. Everyone loved those…)
So I added a couple of moving platforms to The Bridge room. You need to navigate these to get the Duck out.
My moving platforms plugin wasn’t as tidy as the Switch / Responder one from earlier in the week, so I refactored it to match. Turns out, it’s a bit of a ball-ache to resize Decals through blueprints – I use these for blob shadows – which lead me to Comedy Bug Of The Week: Every time I walked into The Bridge Room, all the lights went out. Took me a couple of hours to debug, and of course, it was the blob shadows being scaled up to the size of the universe, and then drawing over the top of everything.
FFS.
Anyway… My rooms are reasonably close together, but unfortunately, the Audio Volumes I’d placed (for reverb) were overlapping. This caused occasional “Odd Sounds”. I now have a single Audio Volume that the camera then moves around the world. Room Controllers grab the Audio Volume and swap out its reverb settings depending on their size. Phew.
Just noticed that my fancy "Character Is Occluded" effect renders when I fade the screen out, which looks a little silly. I need to find a nice way to handle that…
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