Don't Spill Your Beans (WindieGo)

  Embracing the spirit of Thanksgiving, this week served as a reminder that amidst the hustle and bustle of work, prioritizing moments to recharge and nurture our well-being is equally vital. Fortunately, thus far in the month, this project has unfolded seamlessly, free from any significant errors or challenges. I must express my gratitude to the incredible team I've collaborated with so far; their dedication and cooperation have been nothing short of amazing. Looking ahead, I aspire to maintain these valuable connections. Wishing everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with gratitude and joy! Author: Justin Bethea Post: 11/25/2023

 I chose to implement an animated widget utilizing c++ and Unreal Engine 5. Setting up the animated widget was a challenge in itself, but I got it done and learned a lot along the way. Setting up the widget to be used in script was a whole new task in itself. After doing some research I knew what I needed to do.  First, I needed to set up the UPROPERTY in the widgets script properly, which required a specific property to be set. I also needed to set up the PlayAnimation function a certain way to get it to play the animation forwards and backwards because the widget was meant to be toggled. Then I needed to ensure the buttons were connected properly. Lastly, I made sure all of the blueprints were connected properly. After some debugging I realized I forgot to mark some functions as UFUNCTION and the menu was set up as intended.  Author: Zachary Giffin Posted: 11/17/2023

At the moment the games game instance holds the games saving functionality. Something I have wanted to find out is if its possible to have it separate and persistent like the game instance. It is not necessarily a problem the player will see but is something that effects their experience of the game. The solution to my search was when I came across a post a fellow student made about Subsystems in Unreal. Looking further into the topic on my own I think moving the save into its own "section" would be beneficial for organizational reasons as it is making the game instance unnecessarily long. While a subsystem is a solution to the problem it is not one I think is wise to implement with the amount of time left. Author: Krishnie Katie Naidoo Posted on 11/16/2023

Unreal does not have a default navigation system like Unity so when you add a widget to the viewport it doesn't automatically focus on buttons at times. This can be a bit of a issue when playing with only controller since you need to use a mouse to focus on a widget. This is an issue for the player since having to swap to mouse feels odd and if you don't have a mouse you can get trapped in a menu. After researching the topic of UI navigation in unreal I decided to look at a widgets to see if they had any navigational settings. I managed to find a section dedicated to it. There are different options such as Wrap, Escape, Explicit and custom. Using blueprints I was able to test these various types for myself and get a better understanding. Using blueprint I was also able to quickly test my theory of the focus not being set when the widget switches to another. Testing Switching Focus When Opening A Submenu A problem I was having was not being able to switch between the rows of but...

  While crafting the item manager class responsible for handling the state of pickup objects and ensuring the persistence of that state between levels and game sessions, a hurdle emerged. It was discovered that the save system couldn't access the item manager because the save system was being invoked before the manager was ready, leading to an access error.   Initially, the strategy was to assign the item manager outside the "begin play" function to allow sufficient time for the manager to construct. Unfortunately, this approach introduced additional issues and posed potential challenges in the future.   To avert this problem and mitigate the risk of future complications, I opted to refactor the item manager. Instead of assigning it directly, I modified it to notify the save system when it was ready. This adjustment ensured that the manager was valid before proceeding, enabling the game to seamlessly progress with the crucial functionality of saving pickup states ...

 I have been struggling to implement the player's combo attacks. My original idea was to just have the attack function called, and for each time the attack is called, it increments the combo and increases in damage up to a certain point in which it resets the combo. After talking to my teammates, the best plan of action was to set up the combo in an animnotify. This will allow for certain animations to be called separately from the classes they derive from. It adds a bit more organization and ensures an easier form of transition between the character and its animations. I am finishing the implementation and will hopefully have it ready by Monday of this upcoming week.

I wanted to create a new menu for our game this week and chose to make things a bit more interesting. I decided to learn how to animate widgets, however, I attempted to first learn by doing. It didn't go well. I began by creating the widget as I would normally. After multiple attempts to complete the widget, I was left with discrepancies each time.  I then turned to YouTube for a short tutorial on animating in an older version of Unreal Engine. I was able to take the information and use it in UE 5. By doing so I was able to create one widget that uses three different canvas panels and animates with an informational panel. Animations open up so many new possibilities for interesting and fun menus. Author: Zachary Giffin Posted: 11/10/2023

 When you paused the game all music except for UI audio clicks would stop. This was a problem since its odd for the user to not hear anything ambient. As well as changing the music volume would be a bit tricky if you could not hear the changes without exiting back to the pause menu or resuming the game. The team also felt that playing a different song while paused would feel odd. Therefore I needed to find a solution for playing the background music that would work while the game is paused and kept the same background music. BEFORE AFTER The problem was caused by how unreal pause state works as it stops all sound except for UI sound's. My first approach was trying to fix it like I did with some of the pause functionality by making the function that played the music as one that can be called while paused. This did not work since this did not directly effect the music being track itself. After more research I found that this a common issue people have and that one solution was to pla...

  While enhancing the user-friendliness of our project for better transportation within the game level, an unexpected challenge arose. The initially employed list view widget proved uncooperative in facilitating dynamically generated buttons that were meant to display accurate information from the C++ script for portal locations. Despite the apparent commonality of this issue, there was a lack of comprehensive information available on how to address it.   Feeling somewhat stumped by the problem, I decided to approach it from a different perspective. I opted to replace the problematic list view widget with a more versatile scroll box. Leveraging C++, I tailored this scroll box to mimic the functionality of the extended list view. This strategic shift allowed me to overcome the obstacle and successfully generate a dynamic list of unlocked portals. As a result, players can now navigate the game map more efficiently, reaching previously visited locations with greater speed and...

 This week I chose to begin construction of the quest system for our game. The idea was that we would be able to place an NPC in the world and through the editor the NPC could be assigned a quest defined from a data table. I spent a considerable amount of time attempting to create clear communication from the NPC and the player through Actor Components in Unreal Engine 5. What I failed to realize was how much planning needed to go into this system before I pressed on. I began to run into some very challenging data connections. I ended up getting a very basic version of a quest system running, however, it is nowhere where I want it to be. I decided to take a step back and physically draw out a graph to depict the connections. I am hoping the graph will help get me back on track this week. Author: Zachary Giffin Posted: 11/3/2023

  After completing the initial setup of our item drop system, a critical issue surfaced. As we loaded up the first level of our game, it became immediately evident that items were colliding and interacting with every collider they encountered, even those meant to trigger prompts and spawn other objects, regardless of their collider state.   To address this problem, I delved deeper into the issue and found a simple yet effective solution. We only wanted the items to interact with the ground, so I introduced a "ground" tag and assigned it to all actors and meshes designed for items to collide with. With this adjustment, I modified the item drop system to check whether it was colliding with an actor tagged as "ground" before initiating the item's spawn process.   This adjustment streamlined our item drop system and ensured that items only interacted with the intended ground elements, enhancing the overall gaming experience. Author: Justin Bethea Posted on 1...

When playing with the controller you could move the stick and it would only highlight what seemed like a random button to users and  you could not navigate to other buttons.  This was a problem for the end user  since it is confusing to the player that the first button in a menu wasn't always highlighted first for navigation and that moving the stick didn't navigate to other buttons.  Example of the middle button highlighting  when controller stick was moved The reason the load button above was highlighting first is that the vertical box it was in is what was being focused on when the menu opens. This lead me to setting its containing box as the focused one instead. I didn't have to do anything to get navigation between buttons since it seems unreal has some default UI navigation for vertical boxes, horizontal boxes and nested boxes. The controller input not being detected had to do with the input mode. If input is set to just UI gamepad input is no longer detec...