Beta Build Wrap Up

With all of the animations tweaked and modified, I finished my side of the work for the beta build. However, since the team had decided that sound gathering and implementation would be a team effort, I worked on gathering sounds for the game. Previously, our revolver was the only sound that I had found and implemented into the game. The dynamite explosion sound that I also had was thrown out due to its irrelevance to the actual sound (it was a recorded sound capture by yours truly and when heard in the game was not all that great). I found some background music to play for our menu, and couple of our zones. I also had a combat track, but we were unable to implement that correctly before we had to wrap up the beta build.
We finally got around to packaging the game and with all packaging experiences, this one also gave us trouble. The first packaged version seemed to have been fine, but it would always crash when trying to load zone 3. It also got rid of some fog that we used to cover up empty black space in the level that we did not want the player to be able to see. After repackaging, we got a better version with all of our custom input for controls being utilized and most UDK controls omitted.
As mentioned in my last post, the game officially has a website along with a trailer up for it! I have the link for the website at the bottom of the page. You can find all of the developer information there as well as the links to my fellow team members blogs.

Here's the trailer though!

AFTU Official Website

This is the source I used for the sounds I gathered. They are from Partners in Rhyme and offer a great selection of free royalty free music/sound. You can visit them here.

Another Week of Animations

So I wrapped up the week with some more animations. In addition to the running and idle animations, I have completed the strafing left and right, running backwards, death, and firing animations. All the animations look pretty good. I had some slight trouble with the death animation however. I could not get the ranger to fall completely flat to the floor for the animation in 3DS Max. Taking some advice from a fellow team member, I had the ranger fall to his side instead. It seems a little dramatic, but it is a death animation so it's okay. Check the screenshots below of the animations.

This week the team is aiming to try to put everything together. We will be working on the website and trailer for the game so look out for the link coming pretty soon! Individually, I'm going to check and make sure all my animations are ported correctly and working in UDK with all the right characters. I also have to check all the reloading functions for the weapons as well. The sad thing is, we have a horse model ready, but not rigged and implemented. If I can finish doing the touch ups then I'll definitely get the horse in as well.

Back to Animations

So the blood issue as I mentioned last week was corrected, and now you can enjoy the green and red blood fly all over the screen. Since that has been taken care of and I have the Alien Ranger model from our modeler, I can get to work on the animations for him.
I've been working on his running animations recently. I finished the forward and backwards one and now I have to deal with the strafing animations. Those, in my opinion, are the hardest to do. I had so much trouble with the strafing animations for our David Wayne model and the Alien Savage. Hopefully though since the ranger model is using a biped and not custom bones it should be easier.....hopefully.

Here's an idle and running forward picture for the model from 3DS Max. I did not want to create the GIF because I still don't know how to get those created well. But here's the pics:

BLOOD!

As I stated last week, I have been working on the blood particle system for the human. With a little help, I was able to fix the problem that I was having. I finally have color to my blood! The particle system is working fine and emitting the right material with the right color as well. For the aliens, we were going to just use the same material, but alter the colors to most likely the stereotypical green color. Personally, I was thinking purple but the group decided on green so that's fine as well.
The next thing I need to work on is getting the particle system onto our character so the blood gets triggered on damage. Have been researching that somewhat but to no avail yet. I was told that it had something to do with the sockets for the character so I tried adding the "headshotgoresocket" near the chest area, but I still need to find out where to implement the particle system.

Colorful Blood follows:

The brush that was used to create these blood samples was taken from here. All credit for brush goes to them.

I also tweaked the reloading system as well, for the revolver at least. Before you could only reload once your ammo reached zero and the script would reload for you, but now the 'R' key can reload for you whenever you want. There are some bugs still with that as well, but that should not be a problem to sort out.