Scripted Events, Pathing & The Joys of Scripting....


More work has gone into the scripted events and other areas that require attention outside of asset placement and level flow. Firstly point placement and pathing painting for AI/Player character was mostly finished. Whilst most of the assets have some form of collision, it was based around right click movement, due to my WASD controls I don't need to right click (that would usually result in the player not being able to move to a point if a collision is detected) so collision is not picked up on a lot of the assets. 

To rectify this I could "paint" the pathing for the player and AI. The red sections on the images are showing the areas the player cannot walk too and the green area allows pathing - The lack of green areas was due to a bounding issue with the map creation, I needed to create an exception area for the player to be able to walk due to unknown reasons the player couldn't walk freely around the area.

Points

The above image is showcasing some of the points I had to create to utilize the scripted events for this particular area - I.E, making the generator explode and opening the door. 

Pathing Areas

Data Editor
 Above is just a small overview of the balance I'll need to incorporate into the game. The data editor is a huge library of information, pre built for every asset, unit, doodad and sound that is in the game library. As such I can edit all the information freely to cater to the enemies/structures if needed. Primarily the first edits were to the main characters damage and attack animation as well as changing health values of generators so they are destroyed quickly.

Triggers!

Triggers are the scripting variant within the galaxy editor, a huge array of information can be manipulated and created here, such as all the scripted events. However, I am having a lot of issues creating some of the events that I want to have throughout my levels. First and foremost, I have been able to create a relatively simple event, but it took me longer than I anticipated to get working. The general premise was to play animations and open a gate once an actor (pre-define asset) was destroyed. In theory this was simple to achieve, but in practice there was a lot of information that needed to be scripted, such as; creating each variable to match to a point on the level that would be reffered to when choosing where to play animations from.

Additionally I wanted there to be a delay between explosions and a sound/camera shake - again theory side this should be simple, but creating each variable, array and constant to play during each animation took me a while to figure out.


I'm getting more to grips with the scripting style of the engine, most of it is learning variables, constants, arrays & if statements.But there's a lot to learn for the most part, and not much time left.

A small video of what was achieved with the script that is above:

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