Archive:
Ah. Plugins shouldn’t depend on plugins. (Well, ish).
Spent the morning chasing my tail, fiddling with the load order of the new NPC plugins because the build wasn’t starting. Stupidly, I hit clean solution (it’s Monday), so had to wait as the entire tool chain rebuilt itself. Gngngng. In the end, I threw everything into a single, clean plugin, just to get going…
Broke the back of it; I’ve got an NPC running around the room. Spent some time adjusting the work-flow (like, where to put helper functions), and made some quality of life tweaks to my Utility AI. I think it’s in a good place.
Added robots to each of the Impossible Mission rooms and tweaked them until they made the character’s somersaults look good.
Antti (Finnish chum) asked me for a build, which I’ve promised to give him by the end of the week. Took a detour through my bug list, fixed everything in sight, then spent the rest of the day checking performance at various scalability levels (I’ve no idea what he’s going to run it on).
I think I’ve got the lighting and reflections setup in a good place, regardless of what you’re playing on. We’ll see what he says.
Slow day. My perforce server got caught up in a technical problem at the Helsinki data-centre. UE kept trying to dial home to it, which caused irregular lags. There’s a first time for everything.
Anyway, I have robot NPCs that you can search. They’ve even got some nice on-screen indicators and a progress bar.
I’ve been leaning heavily on my editor scripts since I discovered them, but sometimes my changes aren’t sticking. Started investigating, and I think it’s because the scripts don’t mark the assets as dirty when they’ve modified them, meaning they’re not saved.
I think I might have solved this by pushing the objects onto the Undo Stack, and then explicitly calling Save Loaded Asset after I’ve changed them. At least, I’ve not been able to get the data-loss to repeat since I made the change. Fingers crossed. (Save Loaded Asset doesn’t actually save anything(?) but it seems to trigger enough to make them dirty… I dunno, I’m not really digging into this enough to fully grok it.)
My searchable machines in the Impossible Mission rooms now emit paint collectables when they’ve been searched. But I need to do a special case for the WOPR to emit a key, then add a cutscene to show that a door’s been unlocked.
It’s not obvious that the buttons in these rooms become interactive after a platform has moved, so I want to give the player a clue… I’ve started work on an “interactive indicator”; a thing that’ll flash, periodically, to attract the player’s eye. I had something similar in the first game, but it wasn’t controllable.
Spent a chunk of the day on the Interactive Indicators. They ended up working quite nicely!
Added a Level Sequence (cut-scene) that fires when the WOPR is searched, which caused me to fall down a rabbit hole: My walls fade in-and-out based on the orientation of the follow camera. Unfortunately, Level Sequences cut to fixed position cameras, outside of this system. I figured it’d be easy enough to fix; add a way to set the material parameters manually, then block the other updates… which was the solution, but… getting it in the right place, in the Level Sequence (so the next frame didn’t update) took me far longer than I’d like to admit.
I also had to special-case the exit from the Impossible Mission rooms. The player character’s movement is locked to a plane, so it’s impossible to hit the trigger in the doorway. Doh!
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