Week Of Awesome IV - Postmortem

Published August 22, 2016
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So, Here is the postmortem for my entry.

What went (mostly) right:
Using UE4 meant that I could get right into building the game and using stuff I don't think I would have completed yet by this time.
It is a time saver my WIP engine where I more or less spent the first day setting up the project and getting a blank window with 3D device attached running.

I also used some materials(shaders) from the ToyMission rewrite, So that helped to establish the look quickly.
It turns out that I did not need to use Blender to make any content for this as there were a few meshes provided with the template.


Things that did not go so well:
You probably noticed that the AI and player can and do bump into each other when navagiting constrained areas.
The reason is that the lights are based off the [Character] class, And I was unable to make default capsule collision from ignoreing the player without it falling through the world.

Development of the PC would have been faster if I used the C++ template instead of the BP one.
The PC BP would need to be recompiled when making adjustments to it, And the compilation would sometimes take upto a minute or so.
I have found that node heavy BP's tend to take longer to compile, So a C++ base would have sped that up as core functionality would be untouched.


Fun facts:
The materials (expluding player) are just a base colour with mult using some aluminium normal map that was listed in the content browser that I tiled.


Misc:
The raised U and L platforms where done with a Blueprint/prefab, Two versions: One with AI markers and one without.
It seams that using lots of child actors in blueprints can slow down BP compilation when signatures are changed.
I also had to add a delay to the spawn and light manager as they would collect the list of spawn points and lights to handle before the prefabs AI was spawned.

I also had a few instances where the AI would not move, It turns out that I forgot to add a navmesh bounds volume.
There also appeard a bug or something where two or three times the levels lost there navmesh, But moving the bounds volume fixed that.

There may be some other details I am unable to recall at the moment.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan

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