13th May 2011

(Blogger was offline for this date)

Yo!
Today id the final day of UDK, and I started playing around with the physics. I had to select my static mesh in the Conent Browser, and added to the stage as a Rigid Body. This made the static meshes have physics. I added some barrels, pots and flowers that all have physics and can be fired around the level. I also changed my planks to be rigid body, so this makes the game harder, when the players remove the planks to the health pickup.

After playing around with the physics, Dave started to help me with my wind turbine, again. At first he started by combining all the parts of the wind turbine together, and created a skeleton. After using smooth bind and painting the weights, the animation didn't work as well as it should. So, Dave separated all the parts, and combined all the blades togather, the body and fin together and then binded them all together with the skeleton. After painting the weights, he tried it again and animated it. At first we tried a short animation, and exported it using axmin to export the animation. In the UDK Content Browser, we uploaded the wind turbine into UDK, and added the animation using the animest. When we tested the animation, Dave decided to make the animation better, and he made it longer and loop smoothly. With the new animation, we added it into the level.

I handed in my level today! So now, all I've got left is the paperwork.

As today is the deadline, my production schedule is that I hand in the level, which is near enough done. So it will be ready to hand in at the end of the lesson or eariler.

6th May 2011 - A week to go!

Yo!

One week left until hand in, and today is about the final details. At first I added a particle system of bugs, yes bugs. The particles was already on the UDK Content Browsers. I set the bugs in the garden. The bugs simply fly around the plants adding a little extra to the scene. After adding the particle system, I retried the Kismet door, and following the same method I did in Blog enter (Level Design, Friday 11th March 2011) and my door still doesn't work, so, the plan is to have the door open all the time.

After adding more bugs and positioning the doors, I had a play through with my level and now I'm going to create the bot's path. I use the path node actors. I tested my level with bots, and I felt really left out, I was sat at the top of the one building, watching the AI, seeing if my path nodes worked, and well......they carried on fighting without me! Like so.

For my level design schedule, I said by the 23rd April, I should be working on my assets, adding them into the Level and creating the final little details, and well, at the moment, all my assets are in my level, though, I might have a look at my original design, and see if there are any assets missing, one I think is the air conditioner, but I know that is on the G Drive at college and will look into adding that in as well.

Playing around my level, I think there is enough in the level as it is, and I'm not going to include the air conditioner, as I said, there is enough in the level as it is, and I think if I add anymore, then it will become over crowded and players will lose space, made for playing.

After adding more path nodes, that follow one another, I retired the bots, testing with one, two then three, and the bots now go for ammo, health, jump boots, armour and weapons. The screenshot I took of the bots, shows the one trying to get health while the other goes for ammo, before the one dies.

Screenshot of all the path node apples.

After trying again and again with Kismet, it just doesn't want to work, so for the animation aspect for my level, I'm going to create a wind-turbine. For my Wind-Turbine, I started with a plain pole, this pole will hold the wind-turbine and blades on them. For the start of the wind-turbine, I created a cube, before selecting the back vertexes and scaled them down, to create the basic shape. I then extruded the other side's faces to create the holder for the fans. Then I created the tail fin, I created this with a cube, selecting vertexes and scaling one side up and scaling the other side down, to create the fin shape. I then had to scale the sides in to make it thinner.

This is the fan so far.

After creating the the pole and body, I went onto the blade. For the blade, I used a cube. I selected the vertexes to scale down one end, making it smaller. The other end was extruded out, making it bigger, extruding again to make it smaller. For the blade, I wanted to add an indentation in the blade, and for this, I selected the faces and cut them in the middle, selecting all the middle vertexes, and moving them backwards, to create the blade.

After duplicating the blades around, I then created joints, one joint connects to the blades, one joint to the cube, and one to the floor, the one bone holds them together, but doesn't joint to any part of the mesh. After trying to import it, it started having a problem, so I sent the model to Dave for him to look at, hopefully it will be fixed by next week