May 30th Weekly Update (Patreon)

This week I continued to work on the magic system, and iterating on drawing magic from the environment.  

The last test I wanted to try (also based on feedback) is drawing and storing magic individually, so that it can be used later.  

This requires a bit more work to implement than the other ways of drawing magic did, and I spent this week trying to set that up, robustly, without destroying how things work now.  (I really like to make toggles for things.  If I want to adjust a system, being able to toggle it on and off is preferable to having to rewrite things every time.   

So while I was doing that, I took the time to also set up a different way to interact with the environment and objects in it.  

How things are currently set up, when you approach an object you want to interact with, be it a barrel to pick up, or a static NPC to talk to, you enter a trigger sphere around that object.

Overlap sphere's that let the game know when you're able to interact with something.

This typically works fairly well.   The few exceptions are objects close together will sometimes get confused as to which you want to pick up, and the distances to the target generally need to be smaller.  The player also needs to be looking at objects directly for them to be highlit, so you don't know if something is useable until you get close and look at it.

This week I rebuilt it to be based on a trace instead.  So the camera is constantly sending on a beam to see what is in front of it, and if it can be interacted with.  If it is an object you can interact with, and its close enough, then the object will highlight and the message letting the player know will appear as normal.

The red square shows what the trace is hitting (its only there for debugging purposes).

This would be more accurate, and can be used at really any distance I wanted.   I could set it up so that you can pick up props you might want to throw from farther away.  

So I was able to get this working, but I ran into a snag with drawing magic using this system, and need to decide how I want to actually implement that part of it.

I was also held back a bit by the release of the preview of Unreal Engine 5.   I don't PLAN on upgrading until the full release in 2022(its still a bit buggy), but I still really wanted to take some time and investigate the new features.  A lot of the more exciting ones they don't really talk about.

Nanite and the Lumen global illumination stuff is really neat, but feels (nanite specifically) more appropriate for more realistic looking games and video.

It does however have a lot of really nice animation and sequencer updates, as well as some automatic level streaming that really makes things easier for the developers.   They've also done a good job streamlining the UI, to try to make things less intimidating.

They really are doing a lot to try to make the barrier to entry on making games as low as possible, and with UE5 it looks like it would be fully possible to make games without having to buy assets outside of sounds, all within Unreal.

I'm gonna put in some more work and try to figure out the problem of drawing magic this weekend.   I don't think I'll be able to get another build out before the end of the month, so I'll try to do so later in the week.

Thanks again for the support, and have a safe week!