Udk Landscape Work.

Swarm Agent Tutorial

Im gonna do a swarm agent tutorial soon. Ive had quite a few pagehits on swarm agent stuff. So expect a short little tutorial on using UDK Swarm Agent soon. Its quite a simple little setup and I dont have any tutorials up yet so ill start by doing this one.

Outdoor Environment And Dev Blogs.

 Speedtree
Lately ive been working on the outdoor environment. Specifically the trees, and working within speedtree. Speedtree is a pretty damn awsome program. So for all of the trees in any work going forward they will be done with speedtree. The only issue is the export, with the free version givin with udk you cannot export them in any other format such as a .obj. You need the full license for that unfortunately. Oh well.

Outdoor Environment
A recent thing ive worked on for a bit was adding darkness depth to the forest. I really want the forest to be an area that the player will not want to wander in. Yea sure there is just adding collision so the player "cant" get there but if the player is afraid to in some way that will help with the experience. I dont want the player feeling limited, because then the experience is broken. I will still need to have a limit and put collision in the woods area, but i will have that far enough back where the player will need to wander for a while. And with enemies on the map, it should be difficult. Another thing with the darkness is it allows for cover of the enemies until they are right up on the house or area around it. Glowing eyes and silhouettes will really sell the dark woods if done right. And i got some ideas on how to do that.

Dev Blogs
So recently ive decided to start doing some video dev blogs. These will go through some of the things i did since my last update, as well as some troubles I ran into along the way, and eventually what i plan to do next. Im gonna get these up and running within a week or so. I planned on doing these earlier but some parts of the level are just unacceptable looking currently. I transferred from bsp brush for the rooms to actual static meshes done in 3ds max, but i have lots of holes to cut for windows and doorways. So once that is done and decently fitted i will start doing video logs. So expect that soon.

Wrap Up
All of the screenshots below just show the darkness and the depth for the woods. A few of the pictures have paths for which enemies will spawn and run from. The next update will have holes cut into meshes for windows and doors, this will take a bit of time and is tedious. Not difficult at least. Also with the next update will be some more kismet examples. I want to get the first 10 waves done with some good solid functionality in there. Probably change some things with the waves sequence as well. Some things are no longer necessary and need to be removed.

Made some trees in speedtree.

I decided i wanted to work on the forest more and make that look better. So i opened up speedtree that came with udk and worked on some trees. I wanted them to have a unique different style. Similiar to the trees you see in vast forests where their are only leaves on the top. Then i made some trees that are really distorted and have no leaves on them. Currently im working on adding some fog to give darkness to the forest and give it a real scary depth. Ill get some more screenshots of that when its done or at least some more progress is made.

Been a while.

Still working on the project. Its been a bit slower then id like but im gonna start scripting a little more to make it fun. Did a little over the past weekend, but nothing significant to show or make a post about. I drew a picture of one of the enemies in the game. Just a concept and im not anything special when it comes to drawing. But here it is anyway. I used a free program called "Mypaint" its a really good program for drawing with tablets and i highly recommend it. When it comes to painting and all the brushes it performs much much better then photoshop. If you like drawing get it.

Working on documents. Holidays.

Havent really been posting any progress as of late due to the holidays. However I have been busy but more in the way of typing up design documents. Gotta get everything clarified before this project moves forward more. Then more will happen in the terms of screenshots and seeing how i can get things to act. So nothing new with this update but more soon.

Using Object Lists to simplify things.

Here are some screenshots of me using object lists. The object lists are labeled accordingly and each object list contains pathnodes of each area. Then those named object lists are then referenced with named variables in each of the waves.

Wave Structure.

This is how each wave will be setup. Instead of checking the wave number by adding one to the integer value i will instead just set the integer value to the wave number. This way I can still do a check to change events in correspondance to the wave number. The screenshot will show the base structure, as every wave will be scripted and all will be unique. Not just a simple adding more enemies kinda thing. I dislike that.

As you can see all of the 50 waves will be in sequences and remote events will be called to activate each wave. This will help keep things nice and clean.

Side note. Some of the waves have had more work done. If you look under the sequences you can see "Wave 2" has a total of 26 nodes. This is because this wave has some enemies functioning and spawning now.

I got a new way to do the wave system, it will be more effecient.

Instead of doing a check and making sure whether or not the waves number is going up. (Since every wave will be unique and not just a simple add more enemies here). I will be setting the wave number at the beginning of each wave, this will help tidy up all of the kismet and will use up less space, memory etc.

Ill have some screenshots in a day or two to show what I mean.

Sidenote, im currently up to wave 10 on the structure of the waves system. From here it will be smooth sailing, once the structure is set up its a matter of copy and pasting the constant things in each wave. (The wave announcements and timers.)

Waves system kismet.

      Heres the first five waves setup. There will be a total of 50 waves total.  After the check to see wave number it fires off the remote event. Which are in the sequences. More later.