Approaching Endgame…

Wow, if I could sum up this entire month from the the last post until now, it would be this screenshot:

Isn’t that great? It’s been nothing but error after warning after error.

I assumed that the animation process itself was going to eat up most of my time and getting it into the game should take mere seconds. It has been the complete opposite with all animations taking relatively no time at all and getting the stuff into the game and working was the real time sink!

Here’s an example with this error screen:

“IMPORTED BONE TRANSFORM IS DIFFERENT THAN THE ORIGINAL.” Alright, so I take that as meaning something got fucked up with either the positioning, rotation or the scale of my skeleton. But…which bone? It doesn’t specify!

So I spend hours trying to figure out which bone is the culprit but no luck. I then spend a few more hours comparing the problem skeletal structure with my other skeletal structures that worked but no luck.

Hmm…could it be my export settings? I spend even more time trying out different exporting options and going through them one by one to make sure I don’t miss anything but DAMN! That doesn’t fix it either!

It has to be the import settings then! UE4 must be doing something funky with the skeleton after I import it so I go through all those options as well but still no dice!

Trying to figure out this problem alone has already taken me 3 days! I then notice something in my other skeletons. They’re all named something different such as “Blade or Axe or Pipe” etc. but this particular one was still named “Armature” which is the default name that is assigned by Blender. So just for shits and giggles I change the name to “FCUK” and reimport it…and…IT WORKED?!

You mean all this time when UE4 was telling me it was a problem with the BONE TRANSFORM that it was actually a NAMING ISSUE?!

OHFFSR2TQGEUAFHCVDA;HVN!!!$@@#%$!#@$%yw

After that was solved, I ran into other problems which I’m too exhausted to discuss at length. I had camera issues, inventory issues, more animation problems and on and on. I actually had to get rid of the True First Person view as well because I was having visual issues with blending and clipping issues with environment meshes. The functionality/code is still there and if I can figure out a way to fix it later on, I may include it again but as it stands right now it will be just like it was in classic OoH.

I also finished up the monster AI (I had finished it long ago but I had to go through it again to make sure there weren’t any issues I overlooked) and that was fairly straightforward. If they see you, they chase you. They’re just rotting zombie corspes afterall!

So now, what is the next step?

THE FINAL PHASE BABY! Now that all systems are in place, I go back to the very beginning and work my way through again with a fine-toothed comb (this is probably not the optimal way to do things but it satisfies my need to be mentally thorough from beginning to end) This is the workflow:

I create the intro screen, the title screen, go through all the options screens, doing the loading screens, creating the intro to the first level, go through and re-optimize all the assets in the first level etc. Move onto the second level, go through and place all notes, optimize layouts, assets, collisions, etc.

And I do that all the way until I design the final credits screen. This will take some time but if it all goes smoothly I should be able to have a few months to spare for testing and then on Halloween 2022 we lift off!

Just FYI, anything that I show in updates from now on will no longer be placeholder but as close to the final version that it can be, therefor if there is anything that you think needs improvement in any way, now is the time to let me know! Just drop by the Discord chatroom and tell me that it sucks or else that is going in the final version of the game!