This one is just a stick
The magic “do it all” tool in fact did not do it all.
I gave up on trying to use modular rigs or IK rigs for the mantis bot ( see https://willkolb.com/?p=1239) and I I just manually made my own control rig. This is EXACTLY what I did for the patrol bot awhile back. This time around I wanted I convinced myself that last time was an lack […]
“Raise your hand if you’re getting shot”
Unreal engine has its quirks. A big one I found is the idea of “additive” animations (see this). Which essentially take the animation you made and subtracts it from a reference pose or animation. This is how you can easily blend ontop of an animation instead of getting some weird median between two existing animations. […]
“Well these kinematics are inverted”
I spent WAY to long getting leg ground detection working for the patrol bots: It still isn’t that great but it’s probably as good as I wanted it to be. The big thing is that I can put the bots on ramps and they look kinda right: The basic idea too complicated: essentially you draw […]
Metal Mantis
I’m constantly pondering what to do about the “boss room” for the game. Honestly I’ve been stumped on how to make it fun. In the meantime I’ve done a bunch of smaller things on the game such as: Another map I tried my hand at making a much much bigger map: The thought was that […]
Rain Wilson
I added in rain and some mood lighting. There were also a bunch of other smaller changes but this is where I’m at. It’s very dark and the rain kinda looks like pills falling so I’ll probably need to do another pass here. I’m happy with the water material I setup here: Essentially its just […]
How (Not) to use materials in unreal
The borderlands 4 issues with unreal (see: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/borderlands-4s-latest-patch-triggers-a-flurry-of-performance-complaints-but-gearbox-says-new-stuttering-problems-should-resolve-over-time-as-the-shaders-continue-to-compile/ ) made me realize I was doing all of my materials wrong. Originally the way I pulled in 3d meshes generated a material of each slot in the mesh. So I thougth I was being clever by using material slots to determine colors (so I didn’t have […]
Touch-ups (also feat. boomstick)
Got the double barreled shotgun in game: I also added in some tracers to make shooting a bit better: On the back-end side I re-worked how damage functions, so now there’s falloff for shots: (Note the damage numbers in the corner). This should make things a bit better in terms of longer range engagements. I […]
“Time is the Enemy” (feat. boombstick)
Now that I’ve closed the gameplay loop I realized there’s really nothing pushing the player along. Right now if I just have “go destroy this thing” the gameplay would get stale very fast. To counter this I wanted to make some kinda timer that would force the player to go out and explore/accomplish their mission. […]
Bunch-o-Updates (also “Git outta here”)
Here is the first full(ish) gameplay demo for this game mode (gotta use youtube because of WordPress size limits) Big things that changed:I added a bit more to the test gameplay map: Including a quick fence model: Also I put lights ontop of all the bots to indicate what team they’re on. Blue=player team, red […]