warhead's dev room

[warhead]

Only kidding about the wrists of course, using hyperbole to get my point across I'm in business every day and know the value of a little ranting and I learned that from our customers who are experts on the matter.
Welp, my plans on getting this to work by using a completely new cut of ut and the engine didn't work.
Very inexplicable, but oh well. Still hoping on the forum that someone can resolve this.
It's not really a bad thing we are trying to do this and failing because it generates feedback to the dev team.
It's like brizz infers on forums, part of the ugly cycle is trying to do stuff, failing, dev team fixing it, and rinse lather repeat.
So by trying to make our mod and keeping epic in the loop with our struggles we too are participating in the development of Unreal Tournament, so that's cool.

At this point, it's looking like I could just pack up the entire game and give it to you guys.
This does work last time I checked and one perk of it is that everything is just bundled up and ready to go.
You just double click on the run.bat and you are running chaos.
The downside to that approach which is the reason I have tried to avoid it is that the whole game has to be packed up.
This is a 800MB download.

If you guys are okay with that, I can plan on going that way as a last resort(in case no one on forums can help us) until 4.6 comes out.

[thatscrawnykid]

I'm fine with the download size if it means seeing chaos in action. Did you get my PM btw?

[warhead]

yup, it will mean seeing some chaos
it's just a hassle to have to download all that every time we make an update.
the plus side is there are no install instructions except to unzip the file and run the .bat
I will need to know however if there are any expectations on getting a server up and running, not sure where the team was at with that before rob left.
I think the package utility must be packing up the server stuff also, but I would need to check on that.

yea I got your pm for the spirits. it will be a little bit before I can look at them. next sprint will be Vampire, but perhaps next sprint after I could tackle vengeance, seeing as how the assets are ready. while you are waiting, one thing to consider is how they will animate while flying. I can add in-game bobbing and weaving, or you could blueprint/animate something up. the disadvantage of a pure animation is that it would be too static, ie, they would always bob around the same way, but with code or blueprint it should be able to be made random to give a life like appearance. I am not sure what you can do in the editor with such things so let me know, as I can do it in code if need be.

[R.Flagg]

I know that Matt was hosting a listen server and I was joining him.

Not sure about a private dedicated server. But I know for at least a handful of us, we live close enough that a listen server should do good enough for now.

I personally don't care about file size at all. So long as where your hosting it is cool with it, bring it on.

[warhead]

it's under a gigabyte so pretty much any place will be cool with it. btw I haven't heard back from tim on getting an ftp login. i'll just use the mediafire account until that is set up. a listen server sounds just fine to me. so was there any special things needed to get that going? did rob have to make any special server build files or such things to get you running that way(doesn't seem like he would have to)?

[thatscrawnykid]

I've got 1 animation for the vengeful spirits and thats for the mouth opening. The particles do the rest, so whatever you do in code will be awesome. On thing I wasn't sure about was whether or not we'd need a particle effect of them "taking off" so to speak. I'm pretty sure that it will look fine without given the nature of the particle systems I set up but we won't know until we see it in game.

[warhead]

okie dokie then. i'll add random bobbing code to make them weave around a bit while they are chasing you. yes, I believe the current trail emitter will do just fine and no need for a 'take off' effect. I will randomize the 'mouth open' animation while they fly so they look hungry while chasing you. sounds pretty sick and kick arse to me and I can't wait to start on it so i'll plan on doing it in sprint after vampire relic. need to keep the first relic simple to test out the in-game mutator support and vamp is perfect for this being the classic health/damage hooks. if vamps works it s/b full steam ahead.

[Dr.Flay]

"...much wailing and gnashing of teeth"
Yeah they need to look like they are hungry. nom-nom-nom...

In this engine is it possible to change the local audio ambient for the player at that point ?
During the last second or so as the spirits get close, it could change to one with more echo or distance, so the player feels like they are disappearing inside them self.

I use EAX effects in the old engines since we got it added, and using it in more localised ways is very effective (a dream sequence would be a good example).

If the spirits have an "audio-bubble" around them, as they pass your own team they will also hear the creepy sounds of the spirits more distinctly.

I also wonder if, as they lock onto someone, that person could hear "YOU !!!" hissed at them.
Nothing more. Only the word "You".
The objective is to make the player literally say "Me ?" or "Why me ?"

[warhead]

The "You" thing would be pretty easy to do and definitely appropriate to the scope of what we are doing, as it is looking like we would hopefully be implementing voices to the spirits, and making one taunt to play when near player is easy. Simple enough and my thing will be to keep it as simple as possible but not at sacrifice of elegance and quality of course. Sound seems fairly broken right now in the engine, as I had all kinds of issues with attenuating sounds and even getting sounds to play correctly, so my guess is doing anything more fancy with sounds won't fly at this point in time but maybe later. I'm definitely for the "You" thing since it's very simple but the other stuff I would leave up to flagg. let's take the discussion over to the Relic thread in cut4.

[Dr.Flay]

Coolio. You get it, totally.
Subtle yet haunting.
The effect of "Me, What ?" "Did anyone else hear that ? Did I just hear that ?" should add to the spook factor.

[warhead]

Okay there have been more issues getting a release going and the above way I was going did not work out.
Raxxy@Epic has helped me to get the process going. He and Pete@Epic are still working on doing engine fixes to smooth out some things to help our mod to run smoothly, but I can cut a release.

The details of getting the process working are somewhat complicated and I won't bore you all with the details, but the way it will work is thus:

I am putting a semi regular freeze on the version of UT that we will test with. We can upgrade on a semi regular basis, perhaps monthly, but doing things the way he has initially suggested would require us to upgrade every single week and I don't want to do that. Yes we need to keep up with latest tech, but there needs to be a happy medium between the two.

We will be using the downloaded alpha, and currently we will start out using the Nov 14 alpha. Note that on their page it says Nov 7 but Raxxy assures me that is wrong and it really is Nov 14. You do not need to worry about downloading this, I have downloaded it already for you.

I will be posting a zip of the alpha on our internal passworded site for dev's only so that you can always get the proper alpha from there and thus you don't need to worry about having the correct one.

There will also be a Chaos zip which you will unzip into your installed alpha directory. If you unzip to the proper folder (which I will you tell what it is), then all is complete, and then you just need to run a batch file, Chaos.bat in the installed directory, and you will be up and running. Easy as that.

I do have a few small bug fixes to make and then I will be presently getting this out to the team, barring any further difficulties.

[thatscrawnykid]

This is good news indeed. Glad to see the collaboration with epic going well also. Thanks for sticking with it, a lot of people would have cut and run by now. Clearly Chaos has taken hold of you haha.

[warhead]

Indeed! In the words of SirBrizz at the forums, this process is "not for the faint". I am a "stick to it" kind of fellow and Chaos has indeed a hold on me. No promises here, as I have designed my sprint cycles to give me an easy escape hatch should I need it, but for now I am enjoying Chaos in spite of the difficulties and have no immediate plans of exiting.

[warhead]

Allright got the few tweaks done I needed to get done. Finally got that pesky grav belt running sound fixed. Seems to be many sound related things broken at the moment, so doing sound stuff has been very hard. I had to make a hack to get that particular sound working, and hopefully when the engine gets fixed i can remove that hack. I will want the testers to pay close attention to the sounds, especially noting if the sounds fade out and fade properly according to how far away you are from the sound. I am totally unable to test that properly in the editor due to bugs(I know the attenuations are working, but the editor doesn't play them correctly). I may have to actually get a Lan going in my home to test sounds properly. grrr!

So I see no reason to wait anymore, I will bundle up a release package tonight!

Raxxy is wanting me to upgrade to engine 4.6 now, so 4.6 engine is coming out soon! So when I take that plunge, things will get "interesting" again.....

[warhead]

All right it seems we finally got a stable release out. I'm going to take about a week off from coding and then upgrade us to engine 4.6. That'll give raxxy some time to fix stuff and give me a much deserved break. Once that is stable and our hud stuff is working again, I will start up a new sprint. No sprint work(relics & tweaks) will proceed until these things are done, b/c without a stable environment there would be no point to it.