Hello! I have made a lot of progress on various features of the game which I will talk through in the next few blogs. I know it has been a while since the last one, but I will do my best to release more blogs along the way! Before we get started, there's a few things I need to go over from my previous blog.
The first thing is the shooting mechanic which I outlined in the last blog which I have unfortunately had to change. As I said previously, I had made it so that you couldn't shoot around corners which would be an unfair advantage. However, I had to change this because the system I had created was not working well with the newly added enemies and a lot of shots were hitting blanks causing the enemy not to take damage. Therefore, I have had to revert to a more basic direct hit scan method of shooting and damaging enemies until I can figure out a better way to include both these systems together and have them function well. This brings me to the first new addition to the game which is the enemy AI.
From the GIF below, you can see that I have added plenty of new things throughout but this section will focus on the enemies. This particular enemy has two senses which are sight and hearing. On spawn, the enemies will have predetermined target points around the map which they will go to in a set order. Once they've gone through each point assigned to them, they can be set to either loop, patrol back, or do nothing. When the player runs around the map without crouching or in prone, their footsteps will be heard up to a certain distance. The enemy will then go and investigate where they last heard a footstep. They will get there, stop, walk and search within a small radius in a loop 5 times, and then return to their patrol path if they don't spot the player or hear another sound. If the player is spotted, they will enter a caution state where they will chase the player and their light will turn red. Currently, their light turns red while the player is in their view so this is not working exactly as I would like it to but this will be changed later. This can be seen in the second GIF below. The sense of sound is also seen in the second GIF as another enemy rushes to the player location as they have heard the player walk through the puddle at a high enough speed to create a sound they picked up on. I will also eventually add that the enemy light becomes yellow when they hear a sound or are investigating an area to better distinguish their states to the player. They are still a bit buggy and I would like to incorporate the Unreal EQS system at a later date to make the AI even better.
Aerial view of AI patrolling
AI sight and hearing detection
Lights being turned on and off attracting guards
The next thing that has changed from the first post is that the animation bugs previously mentioned have been fixed such as the stuttering when walking backwards and new animations have been added. These can be seen in the GIF below. Some of them are:
Taking damage
Takedowns
Death
Aiming down sights in all directions - gun follows
Crouching
Reloading
Firing
Animations
Takedown
The takedown is one of the ways an enemy can be killed as well as being completely silent. Once the player is in range of the enemy, a prompt appears on screen to press the E key to perform a takedown. Once pressed, the player and enemy are moved into a position where the takedown animations can be played correctly and then proceeds. This instantly takes out the enemy and gives the player EXP towards the next level and level unlock.
These animations have been used from both Mixamo and the animation starter pack from the Unreal store. To get these animations working with the UE mannequin, I had to create an IKRetargeter which allowed the animations to be mapped from the X-Bot character from Mixamo to the UE Mannequin. This was relatively straight forward to do and I can now import animations directly from Mixamo into my game. This also means that I will be able to relatively easily switch the player character model out for a new one from Mixamo when I am ready to use one. The same can be said for the enemy models as this same system can be applied for them too.
Here you can see the takedown animation that I have used, which is from Mixamo, in action with both the X-Bot from Mixamo and the UE Mannequin.
The next blogs will be a direct continuation from this blog and will be uploaded over the next few days. They will show off the new weapon models, individual weapon damage, reloading, ammo counts, widgets and more. I have a lot to show and will likely split these into separate blogs to avoid making a singular blog too long.
Thanks for reading and I hope to see you in the next blog which will release soon!
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