I’ve been using ableton for years and I never played too much around with the loop setting in operator.
What this does is that it loops the pre-release portion of the envelope for the selected oscillator. This lets you make generative sounds that are just a bunch of pops and clicks. If you get creative with the chain settings ( the yellow, cyan, purple and orange boxes)
You can really make some weird stuff.
I overcompressed the master channel so when the bass comes in everything else dips. But still I’m happy with the reverb-y stuff here (maybe if it didn’t crack as much….).
Been doing more with the game and got to the point where levels are starting to feel like levels and my “assetImports” folder is blowing up.
More work still needed but I’m starting to get a warehouse vibe that I think I’m going to roll with until it gets stale.
I pretty much gave up on the hit reactions for now. If I come back to that I think I’ll need to make a human-style character, then look through some unreal tutorials before I can move back to the bot.
Loops McKenzie: The cool one of the group
Yes, I’ve been slacking so I went back into Abelton as a therapeutic exercise.
Nothing special here, but it’s one of those things that I really should flesh out as a song. You can hear something more that if I spend more time on I’d probably get.
On the game front I’m struggling getting some of the physical animations to work. Mostly because 90% of the documentation assumes you have a human based skeleton, I’m working with this abnormal weirdness. But no worries it’s a matter of time at this point.
I had another loop that I made a few days ago, which I didn’t like at first because it sounds very much like a videogame background music. However, I spent some time Eq-ing it and it’s quite pleasant (But it does sound like video game background music).
It reminded me of some early 2000’s indie games. Specifcally FEZ:
Which the comparison is definitely an insult to fez haha.
I sampled Japanese house in this one (…or did I?) :
Also I’m stuck on that game trying to make hit reactions…this is how far I got:
Messing with particle effects today. Above is the result of setting muzzle flash brightness WAAAY to high.
Once I played around with settings I got a good feel for things:
In addition I worked bullet holes so they look a little less “clean”. I still want to get some random going on there but honestly they’re good enough, especially when zoomed out really far.
I’ve also done some work on the physics body of the patrol bot. Now when they die they don’t fly into a million pieces. This stages some of the work needed to make proper impact hit points, however I’ll probably need to scale back the number of collision boxes used on the mesh.
Still using the fake name “BlackLace” I sprinted over the weekend and made a first build of the game.
Features:
Yeah it’s very early but I got paranoid after seeing my GPU memory jump up to 14.9 gb so I wanted to try to send builds to people with less powerful graphics cards (I got a 4090 with 24gb of vram which is overkill for the mat textures I’m using everywhere so I’m not sure where the 14.9 came from…) UPDATE: It wasnt taking 14.9gb it was only taking 3gb
In addition I added in a bunch of quality of life UI elements in spaghetti blueprints that I will definitely forget next week
One of the most aggravating things about unreal is the half way gameplay framework. The GameMode is a weird half way point between arbiter and useless interface that you need to re-implement. Putting things in the game mode is the “Right” way to do things that are dictating the flow of the game but is isn’t needed. For example, in this case I have the game mode handling spawning of patrol bots and the transition from spectator to player in the game. However, something the gamemode failed to do is to 1.) Have a running list of all pawns (you need to make that yourself) 2.) Transition the player back to spectator upon being killed. I have the player pawn spawning and calling the “possess” function on the baseline controller which is crazy silly (I can probably fix that with ordering but still…).
Here’s some gameplay from the exported build.
(I wont use the snipping tool to record videos anymore…)
Big annoyances:
1.) When you shoot a wall it looks like snow (Need to spend more time making some 2d assets)
2.) Enemies collide with corpses (Not sure how that’s happening…)
3.) Reloading/weapon switching isn’t great (I really dont want to make reload animations but I think I need to now)
4.) The pistol I guess i have doing no damage? (Variable value change.)
5.) Enemies get stale fast. (I have a plan for this)
6.) I don’t turn off footsteps after the player dies so they keep going (Have an idea of whats happening here)
7.) The guns poke through the wall (I’ll probably make the gun model turn up or just make holder animations)
8.) Hud looks terrible
Minor nit picks:
1.) The AR Muzzle flash doesn’t stick to the gun always (Seems to be a niagra mesh renderer problem?)
2.) Some of the sounds are bad (I can spend more time here)
3.) Some of the grouping of Enemies (I think that will be fixed with the corpse collision part)
4.) No crouching (Just need to setup a input action)
5.) No hit reactions from the bots (i think I can fix this with a proper physics asset made)
6.) No fired shells
Things that will test my patience:
1.) I need to make a computer settings menu…
2.) I need to compensate for different resolutions
3.) I need to make a proper physics asset for the patrol bot
Oh also I made some junk to fill in the levels with:
Last one I had from an older project but I put new materials on it.
Today I decided I needed to start making this an actual “game” rather than just focusing on the asset side of things. To start I made a simple arena:
Essentially a bunch of walk-able pathways and two towers in the center. The goal was to essentially stress out the AI by putting a bunch of stuff in the way. This succeeded and I had to re-write a bunch of the AI tasks (luckily not the base ai tree too much).
Now the ai flow is:
1.) Check if it needs to reload
2.) Start fighting
3.) If it has ammo, try to move to a “strafeTarget” (i.e. a tactically relevant position) , if it doesn’t have one or can’t move to said target just generally move towards the target.
4.) Wait a few seconds to let some bulletsfly(firing timing happens in the patrol bot logic, not the ai logic)
5.) If you have ammo find a new tactically relevant position to stand in
In addition I have the AI and the patrol bots doing line traces from either the intended target position to the character to see if it can hit the shots it’s aiming for, or if it needs to move.
The big struggle today was setting up the AI settings for unreal, which in general are a real pain. I’m worried I made it basically unplayable on cheaper PC’s but I’ll need to get a build together for testers before I start optimizing. The way unreal’s AI works (and I think uniity is pretty similar) is by setting up a grid of points, then using an “navigation agent” to handle how pathfinding works. This navigation agent is a primitive object (I assume a cube but I’m not 100% sure) that is placed along projected paths to check if it’s possible to move to the target location. If unreal/unity Didn’t have this concept you’d hit a bunch of issues with the AI trying to navigate it’s body through a bunch of pinhole sized paths. So to handle cornering a bit better I started messing with the AI agent size: (Nav agent height near the bottom)
However, I quickly found out that A.) You need to change it int he “navigation Mesh” settings:
also, AND that if you don’t have dynamic re-generation on Unreal just starts saying that the nav mesh needs to be rebuild (and I wasn’t sure how to do that…). So I had to check the “FORCE REBUILD” guy and set the “runtime generation” to dynamic.
This biggest hit here will be performance but again I’d rather rush a build, have it run like crap then optimize as needed.
The bots are doing most of the main things that I think baseline quality AI does:
1.)Don’t shoot at you if it doesn’t see you
2.)Don’t get stuck on corners
3.)Play an animation when turning
The three things it still needs:
1.) Coordination between bots
2.) Less bumping into other bots.
3.) Some form of IK
But In my opinion those things are secondary at the moment. The next thing I want to jump on is a basic health + hud+weapon system so there’s a “game” part of this.
Also this needs to be fixed, but I’ll probably write up a whole thing about how Unreal’s deferred rendering kinda sucks for First person view models (even though the originally “Unreal” games were all first person shooters….)
THE GLORIOUS ROBOT ARMY HAS BEEN CREATED
Working on these guys made me pull in all of the knowledge of unreal and blender I’ve learned over the years. I’ll break it down into hurdles that I had to overcome.
1.) Retargeting skeletons
All of these models have their own skeletons, and each animation that you import has its own skeleton assignment. For the life of me I had no idea how to swap animations that I imported from version 1 of a model to version 2 (i.e. all of the skeleton bones had the same names). I went down a dark path of ik rigging just to realize I should’ve just right clicked a single animation.
…nuts…I had to re-import the assault rifle because I removed the stock for the bot and I made a new animation for the bot:
2.) Making the bots reload.
Again so the goal was to make the bots throw a physical object into the air so that the player would have the opportunity to shoot it. This is a crazy concept that requires a lot of tweaking to get right. The idea here is that I mark a point on the back of the bot as a “throw point” where I spawn a mag.
Then Unreal has a system called “Animation Notifies” which lets me communicate from an animation asset through an animation blueprint back to the controlled pawn.
You can see there are two here: “release Mag” which is the bot dropping a mag and “Spawn Mag” which creates and throws the new mag.
These are then tied to triggers within the animation blueprint to call back to the pawn.
Honestly not a great system but its apparently how unreal wants us to handle these things. Ideally you would have a nicer hierarchy of ownership but making what I would consider “Good” software left the room once I decided to go with blueprints.
3.) Unreal’s AI is helpful and horrible at the same time.
The tree I showed yesterday was very simplistic relative to this. When looking at this the first reaction is “oh yeah that makes sense” then “wait why would you do it this way” then finally “I don’t understand what this picture is”. So quick explanation: start at the root node, go down to the sequence node which triggers the nodes below it from left to right. The green box uptop is called a “service” and essentially is a while(true) loop that triggers while the sequence is executing. The blue boxes are if checks that happen before executing each node, for example “doIHaveAmmo” is used twice here and checks if the bot has ammo before executing. In the event that these blueboxes return false the entire sequence is canceled and you go back to the first node in the sequence(which in this case is the reload node).
4.) Niagra confuses me and I might get back into HLSL to avoid it
I made the muzzle flashes but I still kinda hate how they look. I started trying to make some 2d stuff but that ended up not really working:
The idea there was to try to make a ribbon that had a sinewave of width that would be lower frequency and a radial sinewave that would give bumps on the side. That didn’t really work however.
Then I got creative with making a mesh in blender and importing it in as the firecloud that comes out the front of the gun.
I stuck with that 2nd iteration and it seems like its better than the ribbon but I still want some more cloud-ness to it.
When firing (as seen above) it kinda looks like an orb just kinda spawned in front of your barrel. Most other games try to do this with 2d sprites however I’m a big fan of 3d sprite muzzle flashes like those from the tf2 announcement trailer:
Image taken from : https://gamebanana.com/mods/198837
I might just add some more spikes onto the current model and call it quits on that front.
Now next up for work is probably the environment, I have a bunch of reference images of place I thought were cool in boston and the surrounding area I’m going to try to generate some textures using them as inspiration. I then eventually have to do audio but I’m really dreading looking back into unreal’s dsp system. It’s very intense (and I literally do hardware based DSP in my day job).