Week 8 - Cause and Effect

So last week I had a presentation, an update on how the project has been progressing. I feel like the presentation went well. Maybe I could have rehearsed a few more times. I had a lot of videos in my presentation and they ate into my time.

I was praised for the presentation itself.

Artificial Unintelligence

This week I had a terrible realisation. The realisation that the AI won't be able to move because I have set them up as the wrong kind of blueprint. When it came to starting their movement, which would have animation, I knew I was in trouble. I had to transfer all of the code and parent-child structure to new Character blueprints which can support a skeletal mesh.

The new blueprints look a lot more satisfying when simulating physics but realised a problem with the capsule components of the enemies becoming detached from the mesh. This caused issues with the actor once it stopped simulating physics.

I have watched a few different youtube videos, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAOZi7rVuFA&t=441s

I think that I will try and implement a similar setup so that when the enemies get knocked down, they can get back up.

EarthQuake!!

This lead me to fiddling with the knockback effect again. Not only because I had to adjust it for the new blueprints, but also because I wasn't quite happy with it.

It keeps getting more and more complicated. as do other parts of my spell system. After having a few rough weeks of not feeling like I was getting anything done, it was nice to get down to just tinkering with one mechanic. While it is not the most efficient use of my time, it is a part of the process that I really enjoy.

BIG ISSUE

Just as things were looking up. While working on the playable character for a few hours, I had a crash with Unreal engine and the project would not reopen. I was freaking out quite a bit. I had backups that were only a few hours of work lost.

My lecturer saved my project by suggesting a corruption of the main character blueprint and by extension, any levels that the blueprint would be loaded in. Since the editor was loading one of these tainted levels, it would crash upon opening. I removed them and replaced them with an older version of the blueprint from a backup.

This Week in Review

The real issue was not being able to discern what had caused the meltdown. The fear of not knowing what I could touch took away any motivation I had to work on the project.

At times, I was pretty sure I was going to have to start again. Every time that I started working on the backup, I would find the same issue occurring.

At the end of week 8, I was depressed, unsure about the future of the project, and locked in a state of choice paralysis as to what to do about it.