Final assignment, continued.

To carry on from where I left off, the assignment has now been completed. The final week of work was very long and quite difficult. To start of, the scripting in the final map was completed, so that was all our scripting complete. So we went back to the first maps and started to make them look professional. James worked on the first map, the city, and I worked on the tubestation.

For the tubestation, I wanted to create a map that showed the destruction of a tubestation. To do this I created a map that was dark, and had smashed up trains in it. To give the idea that a battle had taken place down there, I had a train that is smashed up, partly on the platform. I also placed two more trains that had been smashed up into my map. I also placed fire emitters in the trains to give the illusion that some of the trains were on fire. Finally I used dead body static meshes to show that something bad had happened down there. As well as making the tubestation look as if a battle had taken place down there, I also needed it to look normal, before a battle had taken place. To do this I created a mover of a tube train. This mover is shown at the beginning of the flashback in the tubestation. I feel that this gives the impression of an everyday working tubestation.

After I had finished the tubestation it was agreed with James, that I should work on the final map. First off I created an exit to the tubestation, and then created a control tower. I also started to create the buildings for the city. Once I had done this James and I agreed that we should go back to the first level, and work together to make the levels look nicer. As we were doing this it was agreed that I should try and get the level transitions working. This was just to make sure that what we had done linked up well together.

We also created the sound for our level, credits, and worked on the programming. For the programming we decided to use the mine, and then manipulate this code so when the player hits the mine you actually gain health.

Problems

Some of the first problems that we encountered were script related. In the tubestation, the problems with moving the bots and making my bot turn around. To combat this problem, I would normally delete the triggers that I had created and then create them again and nine times out of ten this would solve the problem. Sometimes it would just be a simple mistake on my part such as spelling pathnodes wrong etc. One of the major problems that hit our project was towards the end. As we ran our first level we had problems with the brushes. The brushes would disappear as we hit certain parts of our level, which was a major problem. To fix this we had to delete the brushes that had disappeared and recreate them. This took a long time and we are still not sure what the overall problem. One theory is that many of our brushes collided with each other, so this is what was causing this problem.

Another problem that we experienced was with the weather property. For some unknown reason, at one point it started to replicate itself, and in one level we had up to seven weather effects in one level, and when we ran the level there was so much rain you couldn’t see the level. After deleting the weather effects it started to run fine.

Another problem with the rain was we couldn’t block the rain from going into buildings. We carried out a lot of research into volumes that could block this from happening, and we still couldn’t get this working. In the end we decided to keep the rain in the levels, for the visual impact that it delivers. There is only two buildings that this is seen in.

Overall I have really enjoyed this assignment. I have learnt so much and hopefully this will become helpful in later modules. Working with James was fine, we had an equal balance of work and we worked well together.

The Final Assignment

For this final assignment, I am working with James Barron.

It has now been three to four weeks since we started work on this assignment. To start this assignment off, we came up with some ideas and after about a week we settled upon a final idea to work on. The idea which we are working on is the idea of a city which has been destroyed by invading robots. We drew out some rough storyboards and wrote a script for out assignment so we knew what was happening and where, within our levels.

Below is the script for our assignment.

Title sequence-Pan around Destroyed Level

Finally Focus on Player Walkaround

Trigger flashback of him fighting

Player wants to find out what happened goes underground

Trigger flashback tells people to go underground

Walks downstairs Trigger flashback

Robots kill people Walks, other exit, wants to find control tower

Go to control tower Trigger event, take him into control tower Large screen, presses buttons Flashback Nice city, people walking Big ship overhead, dropship lands

Robots come out, start killingPeople -broken up into sections

People ask for help, ‘army’ turn up

Cut back to player control, walks around corner

Cut scene robots see that another is alive

Another dropship lands, robots come outPlayer control, robots appear Camera pans up, slow mo fade out.

The first thing that I did was to use previous Unreal Tournament maps to get some ideas about a destroyed city. After research was done, we then decided who was doing what for the first part of our assignment. It was decided that James would produce the first part of the city (destroyed and non - destroyed), and I would create a tubestation (destroyed and non- destroyed). It was while creating the levels that it was decided that we should only create the basic shell of the level and then get the scripting for our levels started as soon as possible because of previous problems seen in previous assignments. We would then go back to our levels towards the end of the assignment to make our levels more realistic. Once all my tubestation levels were complete and scripted, I started working on the second part of the city. I created some of the scripting for this map, James then took over while I created a small scene in a dropship.

With just one week left to go before it is due in, there is still a lot to do but it should all be completed in time.

Scripting Blog

For this task I have been asked to create a small room, with mines in it. When the player approaches these mines, they blow up and the the player loses 5 of their health. To do this I would have to script the events and thats when the problems started.

For this assignment, i used the UCC method to create my code. I found some code in the triggers -> Landmines class which i could adapt to make my assignment work. However this was more difficult then I throught it would be and I tried alot of different methods and it would not work.

In the end i managed to put my package into the actor browser and I could place it within my level.

I need to learn how to apadt this unreal scripting code, so I can use it in the future on otherprojects

Battle Sequence

For this assignment, I had to create a battle scene using Unreal ED.

To start off I started thinking about an idea for a battle scene. I decided upon an idea to have a person infiltrating a base and a team of soldiers to hunt him down. There would be one more guard in a watch tower. He would take the role of the commentator as he would be letting us know what is going on.

I then went on to design a level. A settled with an idea that had 6 rooms, all relatively the same size. The theme that I chose was an underground base which stored vehicles. Three of the rooms had a vehicle in it and there were behind large door to give the impression that if these doors opened then they could move out onto a large battlefield.

Once my level was complete, which to be honest took me much longer than I wanted it to. I spent about 3-4 days creating the level. I did find through that once I started to script my battle, the pawns were tiny, so I had to spend a long time rescaling my level.

Once the level was ready I went on to create a battle scene. My first approach was to plan out a battle scene. Once this was planned out, I went on to create what I had down on paper. Creating what I had down on paper was alot harder then I anticipated, and alot of changes were made. For the first part I created a fly around of my level. When this is happening I had the guards moving around, as if they were patrolling the area. The last part of my fly around focuses on my commentator, who tells us that the base is under attack. I then have my attacker running across a walkway which spans 3 rooms. As he runs through each room, the enemy soldiers are firing at him with different weapons. Next the commentator tells the soldiers to group up and hunt down the attacker. I found this quite difficult so I decided that the attacker would fight the enemy soldiers individually. Once the enemy soldiers are dead, the attacker threatens the commentator and fires rockets at him, so the commentator turns and flees.

I have found this assignment very enjoyable but also very time consuming, with the repeated trail and error approach, and it doesn’t help when you have to continually watch the video over and over again. I have created about 4 minutes and 30 seconds of footage for this assignment.

Blog 2

Basic Matinee Sequence

For this assignment I had to create a level using Unreal Ed, and then using the Matinee Tool, create a basic flythrough of the level that I created which lasted five minutes.

To get started in this assignment I had to familiarize myself with the Unreal Ed package again as I had not used it in a long time. After a few days of familiarizing myself with Unreal Ed, I got working on my level. The first thing that I decided to do was to choose a theme for my level. After looking through the different texture packages and static meshes, I decided to give my level on an Egyptian theme. I then went onto create the rooms in my level. I created two small rooms to start the level off. I used some static meshes in the first room, and in the second room I created a small pool of water. I then created some corridors which leads into my main room. In here I have two walkways, one which takes you down to ground level of my main room, and the other leads you out of the room and into a different room. In my main room I have used different static meshes to decorate the room. There are two final smaller rooms which I have created and I have also used static meshes to decorate the rooms.

Once I was satisfied with my level I then started to use the matinee tool to create the flythrough. I have used different techniques to achieve the flythrough, which include using Bezier lines, straight lines for the camera to follow, I have used look at targets to look to things through my level. I have also used pauses and camera cut. The flythrough ends by using a fade out.

I have quite enjoyed creating my level, and I feel I have shown that I can use the matinee tool, as I was asked to do.

Presentation 1 - Machinima

For my groups presentation I worked on the introduction. I gave a brief overview on what machinima is, before leading the presentaion into watching the short machinima video that the group decided to work on.