Eye of the Abyss - WIP#1

[ArcanisLupus]

New week, new update!

A day late, yesterday was a little hectic (though it’s still Friday for half the world so it’s totally fine right?)

Anyway, on to the update!

MoCap recording went well on sunday, and I now have all save one of the scenes recorded, and am working on getting them implemented ASAP, because on Wednesday I will maybe/probably be having a Alpha play test with other students here at CSU. Very exciting/terrifying.

On top of that, I spent this week working on completely remaking the maps from the ground up, because frankly they looked really dull. Still some work to do on them, but they look a hell of a lot better, and more in line with my original aesthetic.

There are a lot of pictures, which rather than linking to directly just go check them out on my site:

http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/updat...ge-of-scenery/

I also did a bad job of documenting all my changes this week, so here is a bad changelog:

(24/07/2014)
-New external castle scenes created over previous days. Bad documentation, BAD!
-Made a bunch of edits to the sister rig which ended up being UNNECESSARYHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
-Sister and Esnow_Scene_2 anims imported to Maya and UDK, no edit so far.
-Forest_Day map stripped of some assets to prepare for insertion of new ones.

TO DO:
-CUTSCENES
-Polish all dem animations.
-Texture Throne Room
-Tapestries
-Carpet

[AmyP]

I see you could manage the dialogue system in the second pic in your site. Did you make that in Scaleform? (Oh, I'm struggling here with a dialogue system, trying avoid Scaleform because the expensive Flash license).

I really like the effect of hand painting on the bricks. It brings more life to a stylized graphic
And I saw you're working on texture yet and I checked UV seams in pillars is still a little far from each edge in the UV map. BUT lightmapping was always a pain in the neck in UDK... Even the current AAA games have that UV seam separation visible.

[ArcanisLupus]

The dialogue system is actually a little gem I came across on the forums and is done entirely in the HUD class and uses DrawHUD. No flash needed! Grab it here.

And yeah, that texture was originally gonna be temporary, but I actually like how it came out, so I'm gonna put it further down the to do list.
And yeah I think my past experience in 3D is hurting my lightmapping, I'll need to set a weekend aside for fixing all the assets methinks.

Thanks for the continued interest!

[ArcanisLupus]

UPDAAAAATE

Again a day late. My bad.

In-line with the theme of “my bad” the planned Alpha test session this week didn’t go quite as planned, as I failed to advertise it enough to actually get anyone there. I was too busy getting the game to a point where people who don’t know it can play it easily. I did get it played by a couple of walker-bys though, and managed to find a few holes in it that would have been a serious pain in a large scale playtest, so I guess that’s a silver lining.

This weeks progress has been small but important. With the new maps put in place and built, they have now replaced the old maps. Additionally, I have set up new death controls, so when the player dies they can choose to retry, quit, or return to the menu. It also throws a random quote at them for flavour.

The big one for this week is the pause menu.

The old pause menu would be pulled up by pressing Escape, and would be a GFxMovie, so a flash menu. This was fine except that the way it paused the game also paused Kismet, so the fsCommands coming from the menu wouldn’t execute until you unpaused, meaning if you paused and clicked quit, you wouldn’t quit the game until you unpaused again. Not exactly intuitive.

I’ve fixed this by tweaking the dialogue system and putting some IFs in the toggle pause function.

The result being if you pause during a cutscene or dialogue you’ll get shown a GFx pause menu, which pauses the cutscene and will only offer a unpause option. If you pause during gameplay you’ll pause the enemies, not be able to move, and get shown a version of the dialogue system which will let you unpause, restart the map, quit or return to menu. This means anyone/anything in view still play their idle animations but that’s neither here nor there for now, as it still functions like any other pause menu. Took a day to get this shenanigans working, but it represents a serious leap forward in the games basic functionality.

Here is the ol’ changelog for ya’ll:

TD0.2.5 (28/07/2014)
-Forest_3 doors opened and readied.
-Forest 3 menu and music kismet added.
-AI spawning added, getting tutorial shot working makes for crash, yay.
-AI spawn camera move added! Works. Emma is awesome.
-Map changes moved to new maps. GET THOSE PLACEHOLDER SCENES IN THERE BOI!
-New forest and throne room gender segregated and had pillars rotated 90 degrees to hid seam on lightmap

(29/07/2014)
-Dialogue added to all maps.
-Placeholder sticks and book added to intro forest. VERY placeholder.
-Castle made better on dark forest map.
-Kismet sequences added to TD_Signs_Etc package for easy reuse.
-Musics all added where appropriate.

(31/07/2014)
-Death handler Kismet added to all maps. Very noice.
-Kiset Sequences can be saved to text, so that was done.
-Alternative pause implemented. Seperate pauses for cutscenes and gameplay now a thing.

TO DO:
-CUTSCENES
-FONTS
-Dialogue background textures
-Polish all dem animations.
-FIX LIGHTMAPS
-Texture Throne Room
-Tapestries
-Carpet

[AmyP]

The dialogue system is actually a little gem I came across on the forums and is done entirely in the HUD class and uses DrawHUD. No flash needed! Grab it here.

And yeah, that texture was originally gonna be temporary, but I actually like how it came out, so I'm gonna put it further down the to do list.
And yeah I think my past experience in 3D is hurting my lightmapping, I'll need to set a weekend aside for fixing all the assets methinks.

Thanks for the continued interest!

thank you for sending me this link! I knew this tutorial but I had never tested it before. You saved me a lot of time! Thanks again!

[AmyP]

Pause and exit menu were a headache for me too...

Yes, you have a great update here fixing this problem

And I don't know why other users don't talk something. Maybe they are afraid of speaking something useless. But the truth is, when we are in the "spiral of the game development", some incentive words are a good thing to hear. (Common, guys! Talk something! I know you're there).

[ArcanisLupus]

thank you for sending me this link! I knew this tutorial but I had never tested it before. You saved me a lot of time! Thanks again!

No problem at all, god knows how long I spent looking for a decent system, glad I could save someone the same pain. A few weeks ago I managed to modify the system to include text colour selection in Kismet, but I lost that version somewhere along the way sadly.

And I don't know why other users don't talk something. Maybe they are afraid of speaking something useless. But the truth is, when we are in the "spiral of the game development", some incentive words are a good thing to hear. (Common, guys! Talk something! I know you're there).

I was actually just thinking that when I came to reply, as I saw this thread has nearly 6k views, which at least 3k aren't me. I'm open to all forms of feedback on here, but I get the feeling its more of a forum for watching than participating, not to mention the migration the UE4 that must have happened by now. But you're very right, even a few words are very encouraging, so thanks again!

[AmyP]

I was actually just thinking that when I came to reply, as I saw this thread has nearly 6k views, which at least 3k aren't me. I'm open to all forms of feedback on here, but I get the feeling its more of a forum for watching than participating, not to mention the migration the UE4 that must have happened by now. But you're very right, even a few words are very encouraging, so thanks again!

-It's true. With U4 migration, this forum is being more and more empty. When I finish one of my client contracts, I'll try to help a little more with questions in this forum again and try to keep it alive with other UDK users ^^

[ArcanisLupus]

Makes sense. Truth be told I'll probably be learning UE4 when the year is up. I figure transferring this project in to UE4 and C++ will be a good way to learn them both. Nothing like spending a year learning a programming language only for it to become obsolete -.-"

[ArcanisLupus]

A very productive week was had, so productive that 0.2.6 is ready for release, and I’m very happy with it.

GET IT HERE (489MB)

With some assets lightmaps fixed, entirely new textures for entirely a new old character, and ALL the basic animation (un-cleaned) put in for the opening scenes, both brother and sister, which makes for some much more clear story exposition. You’ll notice the evil dude doing some funky stuff, this is because of the mo-cap not wanting to deal with such distorted proportions (see gallery below), this will be fixed, along with all the other animation’s shortcomings.

On top of all that, a feature that I had implemented, then lost, has being re-implemented: coloured rext in the dialogue system. Only took a pair of hours instead of a whole day this time. Some test dialogue has been added to the debug map.

Speaking of dialogue, FONTS. Custom fonts (currently placeholders to be replaced/modified) which add some atmosphere and readability to it all.

The last major update is to the pause system: there is a different pause for cutscenes and gameplay, both with different options and behaviours, check it out!

With all that said here are some images and the changelog.

[shot]http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/throne.png[/shot]
[shot]http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Capture.png[/shot]
[shot]http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Evil-2.png[/shot]
[shot]http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Evil1.png[/shot]
[shot]http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Evil3.png[/shot]
[shot]http://www.nicholas-ferrar.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Evil4.png[/shot]

(04/08/2014)
-Lightmaps on throne and throne stand fixed.
-Test Drekka texture created, lets see how it mats in UDK (not bad apparently)
-Brother Cutscene1 begun, sis is now in the tree.
-Drekka test map created

(05/08/2014)
-Evil introduced to cutscene, textures and placeholder particles and all.
-Flash pause menu replaced with cutscene friendly version.
-Brother forest_day cutscene complete
-Brother intro stuff in forest deleted, as now redundant

(06/08/2014)
-New temp fonts imported and used for dialogue scenes. So awesome.
-on a related note, test dialogue stuff added to debug map.
-Sister gets sword scene begun, brother is in the tree
-Font color choice reintroduced to dialogue system! YAY

TD0.2.6 (07/08/2014)
-Test Dialogue stuff in test map extended to make it a little more showy.
-Player health and game version fonts changed.
-Text colour added to all previously created cutscenes. Stuff is easier to follow now.
-Sister get sword cutscene completed.
-Sister Dark forest placeholder scene removed as is now redundant.
-Short intro matinee’s added to both dark forests, needs custom animation but is awesome.

(08/08/2014)
-Sister gets shield imported, ready for next weeks blitz.

TO DO:
-CUTSCENES (so ******* repetetive)
-FINAL FONTS (Emma?)
-Dialogue background textures (Emma?)
-Polish all dem animations.
-Texture Throne Room assets
-Texture Castle exterior assets
-Make apestries
-book
-sticks
-filler anim for forests
-sister gets shield anim
-Make Carpet

[AmyP]

Makes sense. Truth be told I'll probably be learning UE4 when the year is up. I figure transferring this project in to UE4 and C++ will be a good way to learn them both. Nothing like spending a year learning a programming language only for it to become obsolete -.-"

But I think the "Epic games way" logic is still there in U4, even with another language. Maybe a lot of functions and variables are intact to use in U4, I bet. But I understand your point totally, because I'm still with UDK for the same reason. I think I didn't have guts to remake all the projects in the stage I am at it. But, I'm sure I will do the second game of my title in U4.

[AmyP]

Do you have any video with your gameplay? I'm asking about it because when I install another UDK game on my machine, it messes me game config and I don't have a clue how to avoid it. I found it when I installed Outlast game in my dev PC. When I return to my game, everything wasn't working in my UDK editor (camera and inputs are the most affected) -__-.

And your game looks so cool, I want to see your gameplay progress!

UDK buddies!!! Do you have the same problem? If not, how to avoid it? Hey, guys, anyone there?

[Cinder]

I downloaded someones UDK alpha (CDF GhostShip) I haven't noticed any changes in my files, but I also haven't edited them much yet and have just build a block layout map because I am still in preproduction for my game. If I notice anything funky I will let you know Amy.

[ArcanisLupus]

Do you have any video with your gameplay? I'm asking about it because when I install another UDK game on my machine, it messes me game config and I don't have a clue how to avoid it. I found it when I installed Outlast game in my dev PC. When I return to my game, everything wasn't working in my UDK editor (camera and inputs are the most affected) -__-.

I'll upload some gameplay with the next weekly update, but as for the issue itself, make sure that the games don't overlap their directories with UDK. I installed my game on all my uni's animation computers for my alpha test session and there was no problem with the UDK and my game. Not sure what would be causing your specific problem though :/

[AmyP]

I downloaded someones UDK alpha (CDF GhostShip) I haven't noticed any changes in my files, but I also haven't edited them much yet and have just build a block layout map because I am still in preproduction for my game. If I notice anything funky I will let you know Amy.

Hey, thanks, Cinder! I'm in polishing stage (advanced production, improving the graphics to make my alpha becoming a beta). I appreciate your help.