Empires on UE4: UE4 is FREE edition

Yeah sorry, that was a brain fart on my part. Kinda mixed up Git and SVN for a moment.

 

You do need it compiled to load the project in Unreal.
Or it pops up a "Project modules are missing or out of date. Would you like to recompile them?". clicking yes starts some recompiling then it Errors with "Game code couldn't be compiled. continue trying to start anyway?", which then fails

 

My bad, I looked into it more and you're right you do need to compile it using VS. That sucks, I thought Unreal did it for you.

 

The main problem with wanting everything defined and coordinated and organised is for some people it just cuts away at their energy. So you spend a lot of time defining what you want to do, and at the end of it no one has any real impetus to do anything.

Of course the up side is no one works on something that doesn't get used.

It's a more difficult line to tread than it might seem.

 

There's different design ideologies, Kylegar seems to be going for Extreme Programming which for an internet project is the best approach. Essentially it's program first, document later. The other empires projects seemed to get tied up in arguing over design that caused them to go stagnant. Obviously that doesn't exclude that you can't discuss things together and give updates or guidance on things people work on, but having to write up analysis and uml diagrams is more for commercial applications that have financial risk associated with them.

@Kylegar yeah a google search revealed that others have similar blueprint related crashes that happen on specific blueprints. Oh well we can get back to weapons later.

 

Quite a bit of my plan revolves around having a functional game to modify and improve. It's really hard to have a solid design without knowing how the game plays.

Once we get the game to a point where "Empires" is the game we can play on UE4, then we can make changes and improve the game from there. Trust me, once we are at that point... I'll be writing pages and pages of design ideas.

I had an idea last night while going to sleep that might fix it. It'll force us to remake all of our weapon BPs, but I don't think that's too big of a problem right now (as we have 3).

 

Yeah, my idea worked.

The crash is because I added 'Tick' to HideCategories, which crashes the editor (Bug Report). When I removed Tick, the UHT didn't regenerate the class (or didn't bother to detect the hidecategories change), so recompiling did nothing to remove Tick from the hidecategories array.

So, my idea was to rename the classes to the new naming scheme (EmpBaseWhatever) and delete the old BPs. I did that and it worked, since it treats the new name (EmpBaseWeapon/EmpBaseInfantryWeapon) as a whole new class and regenerates all the required headers.

 

I updated the Documentation post on the first page with how to make weapons.

Copied here because why not:

Creating Weapons

To create a new gun in UE4pires, you first need to create a new Blueprint. The parent class should be 'EmpInfantryWeapon'.

Once you have your new weapon, open it up in the BP Editor. There are two mesh components, 1p mesh and 3p mesh. The 1p mesh is the mesh you see in 1st person (View Model in Srcpires), 3p is the mesh that everyone else sees (World mesh in Srcpires).


Once that is done, you need to to your Self category and start adding some data.

First, we need to create an Animation Set. This is a set of animations and effects for the weapon. (NOTE: Animations will probably move out of this and it will be sound/particles only).



For now, we can leave most of these blank. Give it a fire sound and a muzzle flash so we know the gun shoots.

Next, we need to set up the Firemodes. Firemodes dictate how the gun behaves.



The first array is 'Firemode Data'. We want to create a number of these equal to the number of firemodes we want (FullAuto, Single Shot, Burst, etc). Think of this as 'How does the gun shoot'.

• Ammo Consumed Per Shot is how much ammo is consumed when a shot is fired. Defaults to 1.
• Rounds per Minute is how fast the gun fires at max rate. Default is 600.
• First Shot Fire Delay is how long in seconds the first shot lags before firing. This is useful for stuff like sniper rifle delays. Default is 0. Cannot be less than 0.
• Rounds Per Shot How many bullets does this gun fire in a single shot? This is for creating shotguns. Default is 1. Cannot be less than 1.
• Firemode Class Sets the class that defines how this gun will fire. Firemode is a blueprintable class. Default is None. (NOTE: Must be set for the gun to fire).
• Ammo Pool Index Sets what Ammo Pool this firemode draws from. Default is 0. Cannot be less than 0 or more than the number of ammopools.
• Animation Set Index Sets what Animation Set this firemode uses. Default is 0, Cannot be less than 0 or more than number of AnimSets.
• Recoil Data Index Determines what Recoil Data Struct is used when firing a bullet. Default is 0. Cannot be less than 0 or more than the number of Recoil Data Sets.
• Damage Unused. Use the Ammo Pool's damage. This property will be removed.

The second array is Ammo Pools. Think of this as 'What does the gun shoot'. Multiple firemodes can pull from the same ammo pool (sharing Full Auto/Single Shot clips), or can have different ammo pools for different firemodes (for creating an under barrel shotgun or grenade launcher drawing from a different ammo pool). You need at least 1 ammo pool.

• Max Ammo How much ammo can this ammo pool have? Defaults to 120.
• Clip Size How many bullets are in each magazine? Default is 30.
• Reload Time How long does it take to reload this ammo pool? Default is 0.
• Damage How much damage does this ammo type do? Default is 100. Characters have 1000hp.
• FireType Determines how the bullet behaves. This is blueprintable. You should be using FakeProjectile for bullet weapons, and create your own Projectile firemode for non-bullet options. Instant (Srcpires style hitscan) firetype is also available.

The final array is Recoil Data. This determines how the gun recoils after each shot. It's very in depth and there are many settings. Hopefully it creates interesting and varied weapons.

• Vertical/Horizontal Recoil Min/Max Determines the range of the random recoil value (in Degrees) generated per shot. This value is multiplied later by the multipliers
• Left/Right Recoils Determines the direction of recoil. One of these boxes must be checked, and both can be.
• Left/Right Recoil Bias Biases the Left/Right random selection to pick either Left or Right recoil. If one of these is 1, it will always chose that. Value must be between 0 and 1.
• First Shot Recoil Multiplier Multiplies the first shot's recoil by this amount. Must be >= 0. 0 FSRM means the first shot will have 0 recoil.
• Standing/Crouch/Prone Recoil Multiplier Multiples the recoil value by this based on your stance. This is used to reduce the recoil based on stance.
• ADS Move Speed Multiplier Scales your move speed when ADSing. .5 means you move at half speed. 1 means you move at full speed. 0 means you cannot move when ADSing. Must be >= 0.
• Stand/Crouch/Prone Hip/ADS Move/Still Determines the base Cone of fire values (in degrees) for these stances. This is a minimum Cone of Fire for this stance. Must be >=0
• Stand/Crouch/Prone Hip/ADS Bloom Determines how much (in degrees) is added to the base value for each shot. This increases the Cone of Fire per shot. Can be negative to make the gun more accurate as it's fired.
• Max Stand/Crouch/Prone The maximum Cone of fire for the stance. Must be greater than the minimum.

 

Going back to battlefield style i see.

 

Bro, do you even software design 101? I'd not call it Extreme programming, more like "Synchronize flying by the seat of your pants".

 

Battlefield 2 is one of my favorite shooters. I don't see how it's a problem.

Speaking of battlefield... Killcam Yay or Nay?

I'm thinking BF2/2142 style 'Point the camera in the direction of whatever killed you'

 

Grantrithor figured out impact decals

 

FUCK YES. I fixed the weapon attach problem. That's a major hurdle out of the way.



Now I just need to remove that silly built in gun from the blue arms mesh and we are golden. @zenarion or firewarrior want to take a look at that?

 

I'm short on ideas on solving the merge issues. I wouldn't mind using svn again, but that limits the people able to contribute down to those who request SVN access. I don't want that to be a barrier of entry on contributing to the project.

 

This looks pretty cool, I'm trying out the blueprints stuff right now to see what I can do

 

And i dont see where did you get the idea i was being negative towards it to begin with

 

The passive aggressiveness in this thread is unreal.

 

Are we going to use separate view and world models again? Because my bf and me already tried to get a "true fps" to work. Which basically means, that body and gun are the same model for both views and the head is just removed in first person and replaced with the camera, but we didn't really get it to work.

 

Can you expand on that a little ?
What part of it couldn't you get to work ?

 

So, for this to work, you need two Skeletal Mesh Components. One that is set to Invisible to Owner and one that is set to Visible only to Owner. Those are the 1p and 3p meshes.

What I'm going to do (since I got it working), is that we will have a character 1p and 3p mesh. The Character 1P mesh can be just the arms, or we can get clever and create a full body so we can see our legs. It doesn't matter. The Character 1p mesh will not have a gun attached.

For guns, we will also have 1p and 3p models. The 3p model will be a lower detail version of the 1p model (it can just be an LOD for all I care). The 1P model will attach to the character 1p model and we can animate it in conjunction with the character 1p model.

(1p = First Person/View Model. 3p = Third Person/World model)