According to conspiracy theorists, Solar Warden is an ultra-secret project that maintains a fleet (or several fleets) of spaceships that are operating within our solar system. Some say they’re defending us against alien threats.
This is the Development Blog of Dan Tracy's Indie Title - Solar Warden. Follow him as he chronicles his solo development of his Unreal 4 title.
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/31/2016:
- Pause Menu with some basic WIP setup with Keyboard Focus that also uses Controller input (needs alot more work)
- Looked into Vector map for "Lead shooting". Going to be alot more work than realized
- Created a Main Engine WIP GPU particle
- Created a Atmosphere burnup GPU particle for Meteors TODO: Collisions with Earth TODO: Setup Burnup PFX to activate and be offset based on look dir from Earth (Ships and Meteors)
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/30/2016:
- Pause Menu Working
-- Hit "esc" or "m" or "start button" on Controller
TODO: Setup Controller input for navigation
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/28/2016:
- Created Main Menu widget
-- Created basic logic for "Start Game", "Options", "Quit Game"
TODO: Set "Inverted Pitch" as an option in Options menu
TODO: Setup "Pause Menu" that can also access "Options"
- Created "Main_Menu" map
- Setup Project defaults to load "Main_Menu" on game start
TODO: I want to create a "Lead indicator" for lead shooting on Larva
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/22/2016:
- Setup Radial Clamp for Crosshair (this means that the cross hairs are clamped to not go off screen)
- increased size of Larva Spores to 2.5x, making them easier to hit and "slower" relative to their speed
- Setup Analog Stick Support
- Setup Roll Tick on Yaw as well. Good for Videos, might be a bit much, kinda liking it though
- Blood splat from larva increased in size
- Implemented Afterburner Thrust Multiplier
- Tweaked alot of Third Person Camera Distance/LagSpeed to give more of a sense of momentum
- Created Missile Firing Group
- Created Missile Launcher Weapon
- Created DefaultMissiles Projectile
- Fixed the Velocity Matching for Projectiles
- Setup DefaultMissiles to be Homing on Nearest Target
- Basic MaterialBillboard to highlight "Locked Targets"
- Removed Temporal AA which gave a weird effect on Billboard (Targeting squares)
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/18-20/2016:
- Fixed a few bugs with the guns/weapons hitting the instigator. So the problem I was having with the projectiles and the Ships/Aliens in game was that the Instigator wasn't properly ignoring hit own weapons when shooting from within his own collision. After trying numerous methods of "IgnoreMovingActor", I found that if you have this on a simulation based Actor/Pawn, then the Ignore call doesn't work. To get around this, I made a test case 2 collision channels "Projectile" and "Object". Both of these were applied to either the projectile or the object, but both of these objects were set with the "Overlap" Flag instead of "Block". This allows me to catch the event of when the projectile overlaps with an Actor. If this Actor is the Instigator, then I disregard the rest of the Projectile's "EventHit" logic. See attached.
This allows me to still "push" other Actors, but doesn't allow me to "push" based on mass if I'm trying to give the other ship impulse. I could perhaps use a "RadialForce" if I wanted to do something like Gauss Cannons or Missiles. Edit 2: This totally worked. It seems though that with the addition of the Radial Force that I need to make anything in that radius be turned on for simulating physics during the explosion event.
-- TLDR; Made new collision channels and set Ships/Aliens to overlap on Projectiles. Projectiles then OnOverlapBegin check to see if instigator, if not instigator, do explosion/dmg/etc.
- Setup Spores to Spawn from Asteroids on chance base in blueprint and exposed in properties
- Setup Health on Spores (1000 HP currently = 10 bullet hits)
- Setup placeholder "blood splat" PFX when hit with bullets on Spores
- Setup some basic Death Logic
-- Spawns PFX and hides Mesh
BUG: Need to fix having the actor be destroyed better on death of the Spore since alot of logic is still firing on Death. Should build some stoppers on that.
-- Setup Placeholder Death "blood splat" that's bigger and slower to show Spore Death
TODO BUG: I've noticed that the Spores tend to accelerate during their lifetime making it harder and harder to hit them. I think this is caused with the AddLocalOffset since I've tried damping their LinearOffset and Rotational don't seem to be slowing them down. Need to find a way to fix this by accurately measuring their velocity and capping it. Edit: I might have figured it out. Notes here....
I think I found what I've been looking for with this node here... "Set Physics Linear Velocity" Blueprint Node.
I think I just found my fix for getting real Velocity! Alot of the problems I was running into was that I was overriding Velocity by forcing a local/world offset and doing a physics sweep which wielded 0 as the velocity. I was also doing some hack trickery with not having the Actor be simulated during this movement behaviour and only activating simulation when he crashed into stuff. Using this method instead, I can drive velocity (This only works on Simulated entities) and make sure it's capped for worldspace velocity to what I need it to! (This might fix my problem with the Alien Spores constantly accelerating).
So I tried this on the Player's Spaceship as well as the Alien spore, and BAM! It worked! I noticed that the Spore is still gathering speed from impulses when crashing into stuff, so I made 2 additions to it 1. Linear Damping is set to "10" making it dampen the linear movement of physics simulation (when crashing into crap, or Spawning for example). 2. Clamping the velocity Input onto this node from World Displacement Vector.
I'm not sure this is the best way around this problem since I'm still seeing a difference in speed on the Spores between those who have/have not collided with objects. Will be investigating further.
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/15/2016:
- Alien Spore WIP!!
-- Been looking into setting up a very basic Blueprint driven AI spore that flies around randomly and shoots back at the Player with a basic Spore goo that's like magma for the ship.
TODO: Move all the AI behaviours into real behaviour trees.
Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress. Progress Update 5/10/2016:
- Earth Gravity Basic
- Roll now has proper momentum
- Fixed bug with Forward speed not being set to 0 on collision
- Added Basic Drift on Ctrl TODO: Need to setup a new flight model that is momentum and directional. Want to set that up with Drift Flight to allow players to angle their thrust to allow for circular flights around targets Done. See below
Progress Update 5/11/2016:
- Added Advanced Drift Flight (allows for drifting in Zero-G)
- Refactored a bit of the flight mechanics with World Vector momentum on Locked and Drift flight
- Setup 6 degrees thrust inputs for both Locked and Drift Flight
Video Here:
NOTES: This is pretty huge! This allows for alot more engaging of flight and attacks on Asteroids and anything else. TODO: Setup inputs for Controller I setup alot of basic controls for this now on the controller, but they don't seem to be translating into Cooked Builds properly. Will investigate further TODO: Next I wanna work on the Alien Spores to have something that shoots back at you or crashes into you to give more gamey feel Done. See later videos
