There are some days that despite actually having accomplished a lot you still feel as if you didn’t get that much done. I’m somewhere in between. Thanks to a very helpful video on YouTube I was able to get a grapple hook working. This is so the whip can propel/launch you towards certain objects. From that I learned about line tracing. Line tracing is basically drawing an invisible line from you choosing and creating functionality depending on what that line hits. It gets more complicated than that, but that’s what most games use when it comes to shooting stuff. And for debugging purposes you can make that line visible which is very handy. I had to expand my playground to have a lot of space for throwing myself about. It was really fun doing something more than running and jumping.
Creating a grapple was simpler than I thought. You draw a line from where the camera is looking then if it hits anything within the distance you give it, then launch the player in that direction. Since I’m working with a third person character I had to find a way around the camera offset, but that didn’t take too long. I wanted the whip to work in a similar way. To uncurl/launch in whatever direction the camera was facing, but of course I wasn’t able to get it working. Since the grapple is checking to hit an object, it works fine. If there is no object it won’t do anything, if there is it will launch the whip. I have to find a way to make the whip crack towards the camera direction. The line trace didn’t seem to work since there were always objects in the way, but maybe there is something I haven’t figured out yet.
After I get the whip attack working I’ll move on to swinging or grabbing and throwing objects. The character is slowly coming together. Then soon I’ll finally get to working on the character model again and finalizing it.
There are countless tutorials on YouTube for Unreal Engine, this might be because of the lack of tutorials from Unreal themselves. I’ll take what I can get. The problem is that it becomes difficult to find the ones I really need. I found another one today that explains most if not all the tools of the engine.
Again it’s a lot to watch. I was prepared for this journey to be long and arduous. Just gotta keep swimming.
GoldenGratus Games 