Churning through this first semi-finalized level (which will probably be the demo level). The idea here is that the warehouse will open up to an underground section.

I re-wrote a bunch of the patrol bot AI to use EQS (Environmental query system: see https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/environment-query-system-quick-start-in-unreal-engine#2-environmentquerycontext ) , which should greatly simplify the the bots and give them better criteria to find spots that see the player, but are also kinda close.

Here’s the EQS Tree:

Essentially EQS is a way to break up the navigation grid into nodes, each has a score and the EQS tree determines the score of each node. (Lower the better). In this case I have two tests for each node: Can the node see the current location of the player? Am I close to the player? Here’s another video of things kinda working but not fully:

I also fixed up the rocket so now it wont fly through walls

Here’s some quick gameplay of what I have atm:

It’s very silent right now…Also the stabby bots are quick as hell and I want some kinda warning for that. The gameplay right now is very serious sam and I want to tone it back speed wise. I think I might just slow down all the characters and add it some head bob.

Longer gameplay (with sound) below.

The map I was playing on isn’t great but I figure it might be better than that dev arena that I had before. I’m in the process of re-making the warehouse as a big static mesh so it’s easier on lower performance machines (right now it’s like 200+ meshes).

My 4090 fan is starting to spin up more often so I gotta feeling I might be hitting the limit of my “optimize later” strategy.

I made a real spawn location for the patrol bots:

Isn’t too much to it, just a bunch of boxes and a conveyor that spits out the bots.

I reworked some of the deployment logic so that bots are physics objects before they get fully deployed. That way I can do stuff like drop them off cliffs after being built.

The deployment logic now hardcodes the mesh’s position and rotation before playing the deploy animation (which is why you see them jump up in the second video). A way I can fix/clean this up is by adding a rollover animation which will play if the mesh is disoriented.

Right now the assemblers are attached to timers, when I get this hooked up to the survival game mode I’ll add control back to the game mode to dump out bots as needed.

I also added this guy in game

Doesn’t look great but I want to have one of these at the side of each assembler and allow some kind of “override” command or mini-game to stop the flow of bots or to flip them to your side.

Gameplay isn’t done yet but I got some paint setup on the rocket launcher and the rocket.

Threw a bunch of random phrases+numbers on it, still looks pretty cartoon-y (but so does everything atm).

Next step is to get the firing + reload sequence setup.

Added a parameter to scale the grenade explosion radius so you kinda see where you’ll get hit:

Its setup via user parameters and HLSL which I havent used in a while (I was fluent in the xna days, but that’s pushing 10+ years ago now)

I might dig into this more just to get my feet wet again with custom shader code. Here’s the blueprint setup I had to do in order to get this working properly

Nothing crazy but I always treat actors as these sacred classes that I want to minimize. Therefore when I wanted the particle system to stay put after the grenade actor destroyed itself I started going down a detachment rabbit hole. But after some googling I realized I should stop being scared of spamming actors for whatever I need. In this case I made an actor that is JUST the grenade explosion holder.

I also started modeling this guy:

Which I wanted to make a “large” version of the patrol bot that has rockets on it, then I wanted to get a laser setup coming out the front. I’m moving towards the idea that each patrol bot has to reload after ANY burst, otherwise the game probably will be way to hard.

Probably will push more on this friday/saturday/sunday to get the new bot in place. I also want to retool the flashbang grenade bots to hold the flashbang in its “hand” as it goes off and reload. No real reason other than I think that will be sillier and give a distinction to the frag grenade bots.

Still need to make more maps, still need to make a higher level meta game, still need to add more audio. Uhhhggg I probably should make a trello board…