Archive:
What a weekend. Our plumbing disaster escalated wildly when I discovered the previous owner had hung a picture on the dining room wall by… screwing it into the central heating pipe. Actual Poseidon Adventure shit happening here.
The plumber was excellent, but I’m regretting having the water tank in my office…
Got the first Impossible Mission room laid out. The lifts are linked together, and there’re buttons that reset their positions. Modelled and textured a couple more mainframe parts, but they’re not interactive.
I think I’m going to make a little change to the “Carry Duck"; as well as preventing you from jumping, I’m going to make it disappear if you fall. To collect it, you’ll have to find a route out of the room purely by walking.
I reckon this is the perfect place to let the player work that out.
The cape still has a tendency to get confused during the somersault. I thought I’d fixed it by suspending the cloth simulation, but apparently not. A quick series of jumps cause it no end of problems. Dug into this, and there’s a ResetAndTeleport event exposed, which does fix things. There’s a visible pop as the simulation resets, but it’s better than the alternative.
I should make doors blow the cape back a little when they open… (Future Gareth: never did get aound to this… )
Laid out two lift rooms – would be rude not to, they’re iconic – and a room for a WOPR computer (War Games reference, ask your Grand Dad), that’ll provide the key when searched. The room transitions are working, but I made some tweaks to how Room Controllers handle Zone and Room entry. Some of my dynamic materials – the stuff that fades in and out as you rotate the camera, or move between rooms – were getting corrupted, and it dawned on me, I shouldn’t be swapping these every single time the player enters a room. Once, on map load, is fine…
Modelled the WOPR, and resolved an issue that as only happening in packaged builds: Pickups weren’t hiding when entering the map. Took a while to work out, but it’s been zero days since I’ve fixed a bug that was down to the order of BeginPlay calls: pickups were getting their BeginPlay after the GameMode and RoomControllers, and then overriding what they’d just been told to do…
Tbh, I’m not sure why this doesn’t happen in the editor as well, but oh well. 
Modelled and textured a robot.
The rest of the day was spent making a start on Non Player Characters (NPCs). I’m roughly building on the way I did them in Maenhir, but trying to split things out into a couple of plugins. One for the interface they’ll all share, and one for each individual NPC type. I think I’ve got the interface where I want it, and I’ve made some tweaks to my UtilityAI system to support it, but nothing’s in the build yet.
Friends:
If you like any of my work, please consider checking out some of the fantastic games made by the following super talented people:
