A productive weekend  

So, it turned out to be not so bad after all.

I managed to finish the scripting required for Craggy Island on Sunday morning. There is still a niggling issue where a particular item is not getting added to the player's inventory - there is no fancy code in the back end, just a simple call to UT_AddItemToInventory. It is working in other places so I am not sure why it is not working here. The only difference is that this is an equippable item and the initial testing was with an uninitialized character (Jaden). However, even after generating the correct player character, it is not working. Not a really big deal but I am curious to find out why it is not working in this case.

Out of the 2 cutscenes I had planned to finish, I managed to finish only one. I don't know whether to call it fairly short or lengthy since it is only 20 seconds but it is lengthiest one I've created so far and also the most complex. It has around 9 characters and 2 creatures and a bunch of VFXs. The hardest part was finding the animations for the bears and in the end, I couldn't find anything suitable. I had to resort to taking a small portion of an existing animation and repeating it a few times.

The doors can only be opened by the bears!
In the end, it didn't turn out all that bad. I figure I still have some tweaking left to do with the weights and transitions but I am happy for now! I also have to start investigating the facial expressions for the characters as, right now, they are a little bland and static.

I tried to use Sunjammer's new tool - the Cutscene Companion - but I wasn't able to capture anything. Then, I tried to use Fraps but in-game, the cutscene was playing at location (0,0,0) in spite of having a stage assigned to it. I was hoping to generate a movie and club it with some other shots and create a sort of trailer but I guess it will have to wait for another day.

The target for this week is to complete the remaining cutscenes while I still have that directing bug and create/modify some VFXs for my custom classes and integrate all that into the module. A big task, I admit, but it has to be done at some point and the sooner the better.

Till later....

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