von Monday:
I’ve thought that setting up a Teleporter which one side isn’t parallel to the others side shouldn’t be a problem…get the rotation from the teleporter two and set it as character rotation and it should be done, huh? Silly me, rotating somehow didn’t work until I found this link: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/69352/forcing-rotation-on-player.html
Hell yea, so after 2 hours or so I found a solution..until I noticed that the x/y position isn’t correct anymore. So I need to find a solution to this since this is needed for the infinite corridor.
Tuesday:
After a short talk about what we achieved last week, we got directly to work! It started with git problems due to filesize larger than 100mb. There were also a calculation problem with the BP_Teleporter which I thought was wrong, but it wasn’t. It just wasn’t calculated the fastest way(fixed that) but the problem still occured after that. With Dragica’s help, I figured out that it has to be something with the momentum of the player and the camera view angle of the player. I also got to crash unreal several times until I noticed that it had problem loading a blueprint. This day was full of problems. I love gamedev. Gamedev doesn’t love me.
At the evening I tried to fix the Problem when you go through a portal that you keep your momentum, thus resulting in a “push to left” after being teleportet. I fixed it by giving the player a reverse Impuls times 100. Don’t ask me why times 100. Now I need to fix the camera snapping to the horizontal zentrum.
Chris tried to build the complete maze part of the level. Based on the voronoi-fracture that he created in cinema 4d he had the layout of the maze and knew where the paths would lead. First, he tried to do all of the assets in cinema 4d in order to import them in unreal, but with the issues that were faced he decided at the end to completely create the maze inside the unreal engine itself. After trying it out with the basic elements, he decided to go with the sphere element to create everything because the displacement on that specific mesh looked the best and didn’t completely break the shape. In order to add atmosphere and a little depth to the whole scene, he added spotlights below the floor of the maze. The Sphere had a rocky material, the floor was made out of glass in order for the light to shine through and the surrounding was very dark, he wanted that the rocks would fade away in the darkness. That day, he also faced a specific issue that was related to our GitHub-setup because they don’t allow the upload of files that are over 100 MB and he didn’t have the possibility to push his changes so that our work could have been merged. Jony was also trying to figure out a solution, and after searching for a while, we finally were able to find a solution and merge our files.
Wednesday:
Got it to work, but now its flickering…not really a solution. Trying other things out to get the Portals working. Also cleaning the Blueprint. I’ve tried several things, changing the order of orders in the blueprint, changing the tickrate, trying to tick something after a tick, calculating differently and so on. No Succes there.
I’ve played around with flickering light and I noticed immediately the very bad UV-Mapping done earlier by my. So I had to recreate the tunnels again, this time with no wall thickness and better UV-Mapping, which also needed some time due to lack of experience and problems.
In addition to actually creating the maze, Chris created a blueprint that had the function of creating a spline, and on that path, he could add a mesh that would be duplicated over and over with the advantage that the transition between the mesh would be automatically calculated. To give an example, if he had modelled the part of a tube inside of cinema 4d, imported that into unreal and used then the mentioned blueprint, he could basically create a tube system that would follow the spline that one drew. This is a useful function, we just needed to figure out how to use it in the right matter. The next thing was to actually align the elements that we both created (infinite corridors and maze) in order to create the level. Chris started to do this and tried to transition the elements so that they would make sense. The corridors were still in a raw state from the artistic point of view, they only had blue and green glowing materials on them. He tried to come up with some ideas during the day and tried to change the visual properties of the corridors.
Thursday:
We sat together and showed us our ideas, combining them later on the floor. We’ve also added Pictures on the Wall and tried it in the level, which actually looks nice. Thanks to a “rendering frozen” bug in unreal, we got an interesting new look at our level which we probably want to have at start. I figured out how to fake fog with a postprocessing volume, which is awesome! No more overall fog.
Friday/Saturday:
Our setup was basically to work on the created elements and go a little bit further with the details. We had the basic layout of the level, we just needed to think about the small things for example adding meshes, visual effects, lights. For the corridors we thought that frames would be very fitting, and inside the frames we could communicate with pictures or just use some nice visual effects/materials. One material that Chris created was based on a video, so we were able to import a complete video, loop it, play the sound and project it to the plane of a frame which might add up to the overall mood of the room. Another thing he did was changing the material of the cave to give it a more “reddish” color and change the shape of the rocks, when the material had some weird artefacts that didn’t look right. After that he switched the complete Map, for when you arrive at the end of the maze and checked that it still looked appropriate. In the middle of the map he added a portal, that should be the transition to the next level, which would be accessible after the world has been turned upside down. Also, some broken glass was added to use on the floor of the infinite corridors.
