Prolonged absence.

What turned out as a week away from my computer has turned into two. It won't be until the end of May that I will be able get to work on anything as my laptop seems to be too slow to run UDK or UnrealEd.

So if you happen to follow me, have patience!

Til then...

New Project! (Mountain Path)

So, initially I was going to make a beautiful scene with two waterfalls coming down from the mountain range, into a river that flowed to a lake. But Microsoft Update ruined the progress, so I decided to start over with a different inspiration.

Instead of a waterfall, this map has a sort of "temple in the hills" feeling. You climb up the path and find a giant set of doors. They slowly open and reveal the temple. A few seconds later, the main door to the temple will retreat back along it's corridor allowing entry. All of this is working, I'm just setting up the sounds in Matinee right now. After that, I'm going to make the temple look a lot more ornate and probably add some more fluff to the overall environment. But here's a picture of the current progress!

Also, a word to the wise! For anyone out there who uses SpeedTree, be sure to set your Min and Max size as well as Density, and think ahead of how those models are going to affect the engine during rendering. If you make them small and super dense, you're asking for trouble! If you look at my picture, you'll see that I made the trees fairly large and didn't flood the map with them. The player won't be able to see beyond the horizon of the road, so you can trim down on the lag by not populating these areas!

Curses! Foiled by Windows Updates...

So earlier on in the evening, I had designed that I would go forth and start another map project tonight.

Truth be told, I laid it out pretty well. Had a few waterfalls pouring into a river that ran to a lake. It was looking pretty good. That's where windows comes in. Remember to save your map. If you don't create an initial save point, then autosave will not be able to save your butt in case of the unforeseen. This is what happened to me. What seems like 10 minutes ago, I told windows I would accept being reminded to restart in 4 hours. The notification comes up and I just ignore it. Ignoring it is probably the worst thing you can do, because eventually, windows will decides it's waited long enough and restart whether or not you want to. So I lost all my progress because the editor wasn't able to handle all of the "save as" windows as it was forcibly closed down by windows update.

So yeah, long story short; Save often, regardless of autosave being on, and don't belittle the wrath of Windows Update.

New project!

So, a sad song randomly came on last night as I was listening to music. I found this particular song to be the perfect inspiration for designing a level. So I put together the scene in a few hours last night and then added camera fly-through work today. I think it looks pretty great, but I'll let you be the judge.

I did something in it that I think is pretty funny, but you won't see it from the screenshot. Basically, I took the skeletal mesh of the necris female and gave her the animations of the krall. So imagine an elongated skeleton of a female with hunched shoulders and what not. I then gave her the titan sounds from the titan bonus pack and basically turned her into a super-boss. The player turns the corner, spots the monster, and runs for dear life. That's all included in the fly-through when I get around to uploading it... In the meantime, enjoy this picture of the bleak atmosphere I envisioned while listening to this song :). PS. This has heavy post-process effects in case anyone was curious.

Reverse TD update 3 (real 3)

I decided that I'm happy with the overall look of the environment and lighting arrangements, so now I've moved on to player interaction.

I added in some cool platforming and timed teleporters. I also added in a Take Damage trigger that will permanently add +1 to the amount of spawned units once a certain damage threshold is reached. Altogether, I'd say the map is generally done (for one team) and only needs some clean up on the bot scripting!

Reverse TD update -

So this is an update, but there's really not much to say as far as my progress... I made a lot of progress, but apparently using a 2 year old laptop and saving to a usb device does not make UnrealED 3 happy... So essentially, it crashed when I tried to save and I lost everything. So this update is really more of a warning.

CAUTION:
When trying to save a file in UnrealEd 3, save it to your actual hard drive. Trying to save a 33mb map to a usb device is a bad idea.

I've learned this the hard way, I hope you guys don't have to experience it.
And no, I didn't just try it once and assume the worst, I made a small change this morning (elevating some meshes and creating a group) and tried again to the same results. If you pull out your usb device during the infinite processing, the saving will stop, but the editor will crash a few seconds later anyway.

Reverse TD update 2

Well, as soon as I got off the phone last night and couldn't sleep, I decided to add some static meshes to the map to make it look more filled.

At the same time, I also figured out that the Deco Layer static mesh options doesn't work in Unreal Editor 3... go figure. All the trees you see were placed by hand, so yes, they don't have much difference in sizes yet.

Reverse TD map update 1

Added in Terrain and some lighting. Still need to change the coloration on the lights to make it seem more natural, but I'm pretty happy with the shadows given the darkness of the clouds and the fact that the sun is setting.

-Ken

A Reverse-Tower Defense map for Unreal Tournament 3

Over the weekend I came up with the idea to make a map that would essentially place you in control of the units being spawned during a tower defense game. There are so many clones out there of the game where you just make the turrets, but I want to be in charge of everything! So there idea was formed.

Here are the concepts at work;

=Having different items will perform different actions based on an inventory check of the player on trigger event.
  -example: Rocket Launcher will throw the triggering player in a vehicle,   Minigun will cause a turret to spawn, and Flak Cannon will spawn a wave   of attackers.

=Every time certain goals are achieved, timers are started to pull the progress back to nil eventually should the player just decide to stop trying.
  -example: A delay is attached to the tail of the function which will count   down a time limit and then destroy a vehicle or degrade a count.

=Take Damage triggers are placed in the map to activate smaller events that involve certain damage types.
  -example: A target is placed above the buttons. Shooting it and hitting the   damage threshold with particular weapons will activate a spawn of bots   that have the particular weapon used to damage it.

On top of these user activated events, there will be background waves being spawned every 10 seconds, ensuring that there is always action happening down on the field.

So far, everything seems to be hooked up and working nicely in the prototype. The next step is to add a layer of terrain and create two copies of the map. One, for a single player to work with where the enemy's forces increment to get greater and will prevail if left unchecked, and another for a team game where everything will be even and the player(s) working the hardest will prevail.

Kismet screenshot: Small blue boxes are sub-sequences

Screenshot of the current progress of the map. Ready for terrain to be added underneath the skydome.

For tutorials on any of the concepts used in this map, see the tutorial blog (coming soon assuming it's not done by the time of reading).

-Ken.