Empires on UE4: UE4 is FREE edition

Oh we got it working up to the point, that you actually had the same mesh 1p and 3p, with the head showing up in 3p. The weapon also aligned completely with the camera on aiming to the side. I also set up an animation blend for up and down, but whenever we tried to actually tilt the camera, we just got errors.
Also I didn't really got the arms to attach to points on the gun automatically via IK.

 

Working on the class loadout menu. Very WIP



I want to turn those combo boxes into buttons with a selection menu. The UI is auto filled based on the weapons that are available to that class. You simply need to create a new weapon, then give it to a Class and it shows up in this UI.

EDIT: Also preview - You can give names special display names on the UI. I renamed the BE Scout to 'Spec Ops' because it felt more thematic. The NF class names are pretty cool.

 

That's an interesting idea. That could save a lot of work animating the arms for each weapon.

 

So, prelim brainstorming on this. The Customize Appearance button is exactly what you think it is... A place to do hats.

Here are some of my thoughts on what we can put in there:

• Helmet
• Face (Goggles, Cigar, Scar, etc)
• Chest (Body Armor, Shoulder Pads, Belt bits)
• Arms (Armor plates on the arms?)
• Legs (Again, armor plates on the legs?)
• Decal (A little cosmetic decal on the shoulder. Perhaps allow users to import any image like src's sprays?)
• Camo Pattern (Free Default, Free map specific camo (desert/woodland/snow/urban... depends on the map) which you can buy to use on any map, as well as paid curated workshop camos?)

The obvious things are making sure that certain camo/gear combos aren't stronger than free defaults. I'm okay with people buying camos/armors that make them easier to see, as that's your choice to pay to lose. They just can't be better than the default options available.

 

Decals sound like a cool idea. Considering how competitive empires players tend to be, this would be a great spot to put your clan insignia.
Will there be vehicle cosmetics as well?

 

It sounds like a great idea at first, but in reality arms have too many complex joints to be accurate just with IK. You always have to do some tweaking, might as well animate idles as well, since you have to do it for stuff like reload anyway.

But yeah, using the third person model in first person worked pretty well apart from that. You can easily just use LOD to display the weapon at highest quality and the player gets instant feedback, how he actually pokes around corners for example.
The only thing that might look weird with this is probably prone.

 

Ill be completely honest, being able to distinguish a class at a glance is pretty crucial as far as im concerned. Having too many weird cosmetic crap could easily just lead to confusion. The other thing is camo really shouldnt be an option if you want to keep any suspension of disbelief, as youd probably end up with idiots running with white in a forest on one hand and super tryhards doing their best to be invisble to camp in some corner. The uniform look we have might get boring fast, but at least it keep stuff relatively fair.

Just make sure that there is an easy way to exit any sort of a submenu, same reason why those drop down menus or so horrible to begin with.
With the preview, id assume you mean that any player can just rename those at will?

edit: Wouldnt it make more sense to have the class customisation open after clicking the small boxes instead of some other button?

Have you chosen what the games primary colours will be?

 

Well, I'm not sure how you played Empires because there was 0 way to distinguish class outside of BE engineers

Though, I understand and I definitely want to keep things 'correct'. An engineer helmet would be more of a hat, and he wouldn't have massive body armor. A Rifleman would have a number of helmet options and bulky armor.

Of course. For the most part it's not going to be exiting submenus but just clicking on the submenu you want.

Yeah, the player can rename their loadouts. I also want to add loadout editing to the main menu, so you can do it before you get in game.

That can be very easily achieved. I want to get some icons there anyway.

What are the NF and BE colors?

 

nice selection menu and it looks easy enough to navigate. not much of a fan of the drop down menu though, it looks like theres enough real estate for something else

and over customization has the ability to get really annoying. i would just stick to head stuff (the face is the window to ones soul, of course. or in this case, ones leftover star citizen cash)

 

Backpacks.

Like zioom said, I do like my characters easier to distinguish, and yeah I hope this version can perhaps even improve on that aspect over SrcEmpires. With hats and monacles and crazy haircuts and other stuff...it does often detract from atmosphere and immersion, and does make it difficult to distinguish people.

Backpacks, or back features on the other hand, don't really matter as much. If you put a decal there or some cool stuff, also subtle armour improvements all around, boots maybe, and other things. But most of the time people look at the face, the weapon, and the overall feel of the character's movement to distinguish what they are, so hats and gloves and suchlike may mess with that a lot.

They might be harder to model, and I'm not 100% sure, but it might be a better focus. At least as far as monetization goes.

I mean...what we want to think about are those most epic parts of Empires. Where you really submerge into the team, the battle. A lot of the time you could do that easier because you did all look the same, and that dude with a cowboy hat...really might break some of that.

 

It'd be cool for presaved loadouts to be selectable by hotkey, Tribes 2 had such a system where they were bound to the numpad and it really saved time from having to open menus and click buttons.

And an update on the impact effects, a simple addition of events creates particles and sound now, much in the same way as spawning decals, which works but the sound is either 1) global or 2) plays where the player is located, despite being set to spawn at the impact point. I'm thinking I might need to create a new blueprint which holds an ambient sound, particle emitter, and decal as one package, which the weapon then spawns when hitting something. It could then be generalized so that different impact effects could be made for different things by copy pasting.

edit: figured out the sound problem, overriding the attenuation / creating an attenuation for a sound to use the spacialization flag makes it attenuate. It's odd that it doesn't do this by default.

 

Yeah. The dropdowns are there because it's WIP. I'm going to change it to Icons that have popup menus with a scroll bar of every weapon available and a description.

Maybe. Maybe not. My goal is 'Don't be worse than Planetside' and it's got some silly hats. There are a lot that can be done that do work with the theme and style, like Shemaghs, Berets, Beanies, Full Helmets, Half helmets, Spec-ops styled helmets... There are a number of things that can be done here without descending to Afro and Slat sunglasses.

 

If you can read C++ code, take a look at how Unreal Tournament does impact effects.

Also, it would be worth looking into creating a map between Physics materials and impact effects. That way we can have metal material have metal effects, wood have wood effect, etc.

 

Ok, a working version of the class select screen has been pushed. I'm going to take some time to remove the old stuff and make this the only way to select your class tomorrow.

 

If I over looked this then sorry but..What is the plan for servers?
Plz be dedicated and not the crappy match making like COD.
I know it's not anything to worry about yet. Just wondering ?

After playing around a little in UE4 I am definitely more on the side of Empires belongs on this Engine.
The way you can just bounce from mapping to blueprints all in the same interface is kind of cool. Then click 1 button and it opens the code in visual studio.
So many options..
I am very impressed

 

Servers. Srcpires style.

I'll look in to a way to do matchmaking or quick matches to get you a game fast, but for the most part I see no problem just joining a match

Wait until you start doing stuff with landscape. A single map can be 22km^2. Aircraft are possible!

 

I would like to point out that we are nearing the point where someone can start playing around with vehicles.

 

I'm deffo thinking about it. This is one of the spaces that is far easier to cosmetic/monetize due to the fact you have no real expectation of being hidden. You pull a vehicle and you are loud, bulky, and proud to be in that tank. We can kit those out with sick grills, different turrets/barrels, camos... whatever. It'll be very hard to pull it out of universe (as long as it stays tank-like) and very difficult to have a 'better' cosmetic.

 

Does UT4 have any weird restrictions with vehicles? Are tanks with limited turret arcs possible? Im mainly thinking about arties which as im told, can only have either what we have or full rotation.