The game is now advancing at quite some pace as i find all sorts of things here and there to add, all of which are requirements for gameplay. The main one of these this week has been weapon equip facilities.
The concept of carrying weapons and using them is fundamental to most role playing games. In The Seven Spells Of Destruction, you can carry a limited number of weapons restricted by the size of your backpack and your level (higher level characters find more ingenious ways to stash more items in the same space and have the capability to carry it all).
The first part of this is being able to equip weapons.
[table][tr][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6491][/td][td]The character i picked to be my lead hero (which i selected from OpenGameArt) has an axe permenantly attached to his right arm as a secondary element of the skeletal mesh. To work around this and allow selection of other weapons, without altering the model and effectively making my life harder as a non-artist, i simply changed the mesh's material to a transparent one and removed its collision. In short, the player now carries an invisible axe which he swings round to no effect.
To replace the invisible axe i used the construction blueprint for my player character to instantiate the sword (or whatever other weapon he is using) and attach it by the handle to the player's right hand. Due to some animation issues in the model, i have some other blueprint monitoring this to ensure the player never looks like he's stabbing himself.[/td][/tr][/table]
As part of the weapon spawning, i have a scaling factor which specifies the size of the weapon. The use of this is for later in the game's development where a 'grow weapon' spell might be cast making the weapon the player is carrying temporarily (and rediculously) larger.
[table][tr][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6495][/td][td]The end effect is a character which hefts a longsword, single handedly too a shown in the GIF on the left.
Along with development of the character and his weapon swinging behaviour, i have added more blueprint-driven systems to the world, such as the ones below:[/td][/tr][/table]
[table][tr][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6492][/td][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6493][/td][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6494][/td][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6496][/td][/tr][/table]
Comments and suggestions are welcome below
Maybe its just the gif and not the way it is in game but it seems like he is looking around a lot. Like he's real paranoid or nervous. Looks good otherwise. Cheers!