This weeks work.

It's been a busy week, although I wasn't able to work for two days, this was because I was at work on Saturday and on Sunday I was out of town. So I worked from Monday onwards. Heres the update this week:


Friday 29th Jan:
Talked to Ross about the game concept, Storyboarded the introduction and worked out exactly who was doing what.

Monday 1st Feb:
Created 5 textures for the terrain. A moss texture, Root/Dirt texture, Root/Rock texture and 2 noise texture maps. I also created the materials for the terrain. Automatic terrain texturing has been setup, this allows for steep unclimbable hills to be textured with the Root/Rock material. I also started to dabble in a material effect that I wanted to recreate. In World of Warcraft when looking at the sun, the landscapes specularity seems to flare up like the sun is reflecting off the landscape. This gives a pleasant feeling to large outdoor game environments. Unreal doesn't support specular maps on terrains but it seemed a wast to not include them in some way. After learning about faking sun reflections on large outdoor water materials I realised the same method could be used for landscapes. The basic idea was to multiply the sun's reflection with the specular maps to make only certain parts of the material flare up.

Tuesday 2nd Feb:
I finished tweaking the final colour and intensity values of the terrain materials, I also simplified them to try and keep the instruction count down. After that I setup the game folders and made corrections to script files to start making this project into an actual game. One of the first things to do was create a basic menu screen in which I could improve later. I later made a basic 3rd person camera which I needed to improve.

Wednesday 3rd Feb:
I created this blog for keeping track of our progress. Then for the whole day I mucked around with scripting the 3rd person camera, it was important to get this right because it plays a big role on how players experience the game. I am very happy with the result so far, however there are a few glitches, but I believe I know how to fix them.

Thursday 4th Feb:
I created and imported a Skybox texture, which I made into a material. I tried to keep the instruction count down for performance reasons, so I cut a few corners in creating the clouds. I hope the result is enough, otherwise I will have to go back and add the instructions. On Thursday I also created four Banyan style trees which was imported from SpeedTree to the UDK. I encountered a bug with the wind, wind cannot be turned off with UDK yet and changing the settings in SpeedTree doesn't help either. To solve this I changed the wind direction to the Z axis, this meant the wind is technically blowing down on the tree, which limits it's movement. I then increased the leaf wind scale which created a light breezing effect while keeping the main trunks from moving.

Today:
Before writing this I created a Sun with the use of a lens flare actor and a custom lens flare material. This gives a good sun exposure effect, it increases the brightness of the Sun when looking directly at it. Later today I have a lecture with Chris Joyce, this is my weekly lecture to see how our progression is going on our Final Major Project. I will also be discussing a few things with Ross, we need to come up with a name for our game and we also need to setup a schedule to help us keep on track.