Since I procrastinated on this blog for so long, I now have to remember what I did in July and early August.
I set up a GitHub project and repository and started to implement the basic locomotion. The character’s movement is essential and, in my opinion, should look polished. After a while, I was pretty unhappy with the result and looked for alternatives.
There was Lyra, ALS4, and AGR Pro. They all looked good, so I spent a couple of hours with them.
The Lyra project contains too many concepts I was unfamiliar with, but it’s well documented, and there seems to be a community growing around this project.
ALS4 has a big community, and it contains certain features I would like to have (e.g., different kinds of weapon poses). The downside is that it’s all blueprint, has this uber animation blueprint, and is not replicated.
Then I found the community version of it. It’s in C++ and also replicated. I felt immediately comfortable with it and skipped AGR Pro.
So I decided to use ALS4 for the main character and build the zombie locomotion from scratch based on the concepts of Lyra. After this project, I will maybe look for an Unreal job, and then it would be good to know how to work with them (e.g., multithreaded animations).
Then I implemented basic shooting and throwing mechanics, added pickable weapons and weapon switching, got familiar with the Unreal perception system in C++, and added some basic AI. Then I added a basic melee attack and a stealth finisher.
Maybe you ask yourself what the difference is between the prototype from before. The prototype contained some templates from the marketplace, had copy & paste code, a lot of “dead” code, and plenty of blueprints. Furthermore, I learned a lot during the prototyping. The current project has better architecture, and every feature is implemented in such a way that you can iterate over it and extend it. It’s also based on ALS4.
One of the last things I added, which took a long time, was bow and arrow shooting. I wanted the character to pick the string, and the arrow’s force should depend on how far the string gets pulled. After that, I added a basic ammo system.
In hindsight, it does not sound like much 🙁
So I am currently at the end of what I call “zombie week,” where I am extending the zombie features.
