Developer Diary 49 - Walls System & Doorways

Once the player enters a new room in the maze, the difficulty level rises. The faster he proceeds, the higher the increase in difficulty. with each difficulty level concentric circles and doorways spawn inside each room. These doorways randomly rotate around the z axis on the center of each room, but are set up in a way so that theoretically every ground tile of the room is accessible at one time during rotation. So if one Doorway element has the setup 000111 (0 for wall / 1 for doorway) the opposing wall needs to have the setup 111000. After the player reaches the guiding lights of Manipura, the maze is replaced by a forest section that guides him towards the first spirit Mahakala. The center of each room is reserved for a large AI that chases and threatens the player throughout his endeavor.

Developer Diary 48 - Selfbuilding Maze

So after I struggled a lot with the FPS locks, I needed a new design in order to keep the FPS high, but without letting go of the initial concept of a forest maze. Inspired by Minecraft's concept of a selfbuilding world, I created a code that builds the maze, as the player moves through it in real time. Each area is unique, and if the player decides to turn back, the previous areas will not remain the same, but they will have changed their appearance as well.

So far this concept in combination with the surreal world and the day night cycles creates massive immersion. The overall concept of the Manipura Chakra is still in place. The player will only reach the Dharmapalas if he moves along the lights in the distance.

Developer Diary 47 - Upgrade

Fun Fact: One of the blueprints on the right became corrupted after the version update. And I have no idea which one it is, but despite the fact, that I have removed all system relevant blueprints from that list, it apparently still causes my entire BP system to crash.

So I add a chunk of BPs, Open UE 4.13.2, Wait, Check BPs. If there's a crash, I move on to the next chunk, if there's no crash I move on to the next chunk anyway to narrow down the list to a single BP.

Fun, fun, fun.

Developer Diary 46 - Building Building Building

Developer Diary 45 - Multiple Layers - Extending The Maze

After a week of AI, LOD and Gameplay improvements I fell victim to the infamous 37.5 FPS lock. So while I was looking for a solution to minimize the amount of objects and blueprints that are visible to the player while moving through the woods (both meshes and BPs of course have visibility spheres and culling enabled), I eventually had the idea of extending Lakini's Woods vertically: The top layer (seen above) is similar to a graveyard garden and has access to the open sky. The layer underneath is a surreal forest / cave / dungeon system that receives it's barriers from the walls of the top layer extending below. The lowest level is hidden underneath the ocean. The walls don't extend to the bottom, so the player is able to swim underneath the maze to any desired location (but of course he can only get back up if there is a connection to the upper layers).

The main advantage of this system is, that most objects are invisible to the player when he's moving through the middle layer as he can only see the objects and plants in the room section he is in. The top layer requires almost no adornment objects, as it contains the gothic towers of the wall barriers and the guiding lights, that eventually lead the player to the discovery of Lakini's rune, the location of the Dharmapala as well as Jonah's shadows. This new system gives me the ability to greatly reduce the culling distance for both blueprints and objects and therefore it might even get rid of the 37.5 FPS lock for good. Additionally the player has access to the open sky so he can use/transform into Hayagriva and fly through the world, or call Mahakala and cause all layers to be filled with water.

The screenshots above are from work I did last week on impact particle systems. I spent a lot of time on the impact FX from the soldier's rifle shots. They are now able to destroy buildings and objects when Jonah tries to hide behind them.

S.M

Developer Diary 44 Why this Code Changed my Life

Soldiers patrol through the maze. They are as large as buildings and destroy everything in their way. A tree is no obstacle to them, neither is a house, a tower or any kind of structure. But because of their size they are able to travel vast distances in a short amount of time.

The distance is too large for any navigation volume to work properly. So after weeks and months of trying to figure out a way to deal with AI while excluding navigation volumes I finally found the answer:

I set the AI movement in the Behavior tree to "Move Directly To". This way of movement causes an AI to move directly towards a specified goal, but it will also cause the AI to float, or fly through the air if it is following a player character which is currently moving up or down hill. The AI may also get stuck when colliding with obstacles, but since the soldiers are too large to collide with anything this is not a concern.

By implementing a Line Trace By Channel that starts 500cm above the pawn location and extends 5000 cm below the pawn location and ignores the pawn, all other blueprints and objects except the landscape itself, it is possible to get the landscape Z coordinate at the pawn's location. This Z value can now be used to "tie the AI down" to the desired location by using the "Set Actor Location" Node.

The AI will now move through the landscape while staying on the ground and follow the player everywhere independent of any navigation volume. If it collides with trees or objects such as houses, a collision volume near the pawn's base will trigger a Blueprint containing a destructible mesh to spawn at the object's location, identical to the original object in size and appearance. By applying radial damage in the Event Graph of the blueprint the mesh gets destroyed. These two little tricks save FPS and revolutionize AI navigation for large creatures.

I'm happy!

S.M

Developer Diary 43

It's been a while since the last update, but I implemented some massive improvements. I recreated all Interaction-blueprints, because they were tied to the BP Event tick causing a major drop in FPS, added a new Game Over FX Volume and did some fine-tuning on the overall gameplay. Currently I'm rebuilding the AI Blueprint for the soldiers, so they will move through the world without the use of Navigation Volumes. On Monday I worked on the impact FX of the soldiers projectiles. It now causes a massive explosion close to Jonah, with smoke and a hail of rocks raining down on him during escape. For some reason he appears to get stuck in the ground when he's registered to chase the player ... can't figure out why. Worst case scenario I'll have to rewrite the behavior tree.