Post Easter Post

First week back from Easter Holidays! How was it? It was wonderful, thanks for asking, I spent two weeks working at Uni and I went on Holiday for a week in France to see my family. It was lovely and sunny and there was a lot of cheese.

Enough about time off, the first week of Easter I spent working out how we’re going to show text to the player. I first tried billboard textures, these worked splendidly in the viewport, the texture rotates with the camera so that it is always facing you. Unfortunately for some strange reason they didn’t work when you actually played the game, I tried many different ways to try to fix it, none of them worked.

I then thought that particle effects do the same, the texture always faces the camera. So I made a particle effect that stayed still and constantly spawned new particles very often, but the particles de spawn quickly. So when you turn the effect on you can see the text, and then when it is turned off there’s a very short delay and it disappears.

I now needed to put these particle effects in the Caterpillar conversation I have already made. As always with blueprints there was a big problem, particle effects are not like text boxes in Unreal; you can set the visibility on and off with a text box, but you cannot do this with a particle effect; instead you spawn and de spawn it.

So this meant that I pretty much had to re build almost the entire Caterpillar conversation to incorporate the particle effects. If you don’t’ remember from before this is how the blueprint used to look:

And this is it now:

It may look more complex now, but it actually is a bit less complex, just harder to read.

With this particle text knowledge I made the cat conversation, which wasn’t branching like the Caterpillar’s, so it was a little bit less complicated, a little bit.

Then I came back from Easter! I Made some pots and pans that come out of the duchess’ house, fully textured and modelled and I also built a broken bridge for the Cat section.

AND THEN MY HARD DRIVE BROKE. Again.

Only the second one to break in a month…

Also over the holiday I finished work on the Container City level, you can checkout the fly through here: