Hello! I have finally begun development on the game after a long and stressful period of assignments taking up all of my time. This doesn't mean I wasn't doing research on what I could potentially be implementing in my game throughout the last two/three months, because I did. I also did start a project earlier on using the original first version of Unreal Engine 5. However, I have seen that the new version has recently been released with significant upgrades such as nanite foliage in Unreal 5.1 which I definitely would like to check out and implement in my game. Therefore I downloaded it, and made the switch.
I had implemented things into the original project such as being able to transfer any animation from one character to another using mixamo animations and characters which is helpful and will most likely be used in my new project if it works the same way. When I made the new project on UE5.1, I included the animation starter pack from the Epic Games store. However, this did not work instantly as there is a brand new input system also included with UE5.1. This meant that I had to rework all of the inputs to make them work in this project as the starter pack only supported up to UE5 but not UE5.1. With the help of the first minutes of Steven Ormerwood's YouTube video (referenced below) I was able to get these inputs working very quickly and easily. This blueprint has already been heavily modified to allow the player to crouch correctly, jump correctly and not when crouching and faster walking speed and slower crouch speed. There is currently a small bug when walking backwards that causes a little glitch in the player's animation but this will be addressed in the future as it is not very important at this stage.
The main thing I wanted to get working ASAP was the weapon mechanics. In just a few hours I was able to build a system which incorporated the base shooting system of the character already in the template, but built it out so that the player can no longer shoot around corners. This is something that I had attempted to address before but to no avail. However, this time I was able to get it working in a way that I think is great at this stage. In the GIF below, you can see that when the player is standing behind a wall but their crosshair is pointed at something that the weapon shouldn't be able to shoot at, the bullet is fired at the end of the red line trace that is drawn from the muzzle of the weapon rather than the blue line trace which is drawn from the camera location. When the player moved further in to the open so that their weapon isn't behind the wall, the bullet is fired at the end of the camera's line trace. This ensures a fair shooting system that prevents the player from cheating the game and shooting when completely behind cover and/or hidden. An appealing muzzle flash has been added from another asset pack which has been resized and spawned at the end of the muzzle when the weapon is fired. The weapon also does fire a bullet but it is quite small and can't be seen easily while the line traces are active. I have already aquired a weapon asset pack which I will be using for my weapons.
In the next update, I will be looking at creating a weapon system that allows for multiple weapons with unique damage, range, fire rates, magazine capacities and attachments. I will also be trying to get an enemy created to test these systems out on with potential introdcution to simple AI.
Steven Ormerwood (2022) UE5 - Setting up a third person shooter template in UE5.0.3 w/ anim start pack no movement bug fix. Available at: https://youtu.be/Ta-PzQKbhlw. (Accessed: 7 October 22)
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