As another week passes it's that time again to showcase what new features i've added to the game.
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[/td][td]This week i have concentrated on animations, and using the unreal engine per bone blend along with some alpha blend tricks to allow for a programmable animation of the player character. The player character can at any time either be in the 'scared' state or the 'not scared' state, which affects his idle animation. Whilst 'scared', he looks around in a paranoid way. For now, for testing this is bound to the ALT key. When there are hostile enemies added to the game, being within range of hostile enemies will trigger this paranoid behaviour in the character.[/td][/tr][/table]
[table][tr][td]Left-clicking on the mouse causes the player to swing his sword and attack. This is built from two animations of slashing downwards and across which are blended using a random alpha value, meaning the arms can make a wide variety of diagonal movements. Each slash of the sword generates one of three wooshing sound effects to give the weapon some weight.[/td][td][sharedmedia=gallery:images:6501][/td][/tr][/table]
The UE4 "blend by bone" facility allows me to bind two animations at once to a skeletal mesh, with one animation effecting certain bones in the skeleton, and another animation effecting the rest of the skeleton. For example, the running animation effects the legs and whilst attacking the attack animations effect the body from the waist upwards by specifying the bone named "Spine".
I decided to invest a small amount of money in my game and purchased a very nice castle model, which i am using to good effect within one of the larger cities. This can be seen in the image above, and the video below:
I have also adjusted the speed of the character within its blueprint, so that whilst wading through water the character's travel is significantly slowed, and whilst swinging the sword there is also a (much smaller) slowdown.
There's still a lot more to do, but progress is being made! Stay tuned for further updates...
As always, any feedback, comments, and constructive criticisms are welcome below
