Okay. Subtle bug.

A Smart Object (SO) is a structured method to claim an item in the game, so your NPCs can share them more sanely than a free-for-all. The example given is an NPC wanting to go to a car door, open it, and sit down. I'm sure, someday, we'll have self-driving cars with robot drivers, which makes no sense, but I digress.

The SO Subsystem contains a magic bag of routines meticulously crafted to drive programmers insane.

I had 3 actors containing meshes with SO components. When I used the SO Subsystem's call to get the location of the SO's slot, it usually, but not always, gave me the location of a slot in a different SO. It took me a while to discover this euphoric joy.

After much hair loss, I used the actor containing the SO to give me the location of the SO component, which was correct. I'll need to adjust for the slot, but the selection is now correct. The NPC no longer randomly wanders to the wrong SO. I'm beyond grateful that I wasn't losing my mind over this. I've plenty of other reasons, thank you.

Bizarre and maddening behavior. The code has now more print statements than code to help me nail down where the heck it was happening. I'm using 5.6.1, so perhaps this was repaired in 5.7.?.

What do we do when we fix the maddening bug? WE BACKUP OUR CODE! Yes. Yes, we do.

#UE5 #RPG

I'm not a 3D modeler, but I like to create model drafts for gameplay prototypes inside Unreal Engine, I like to play with modeling mode. That's 181 videos about game dev in my secret place of examples and knowledge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMawJpkbgL0

#gamedev #UnrealEngine #UE5 #indiedev #3dmodelling

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-5-8-preview/2721597

#UnrealEngine #UE5

Over time I had a lot of static mesh actors with a visual role in the scene and I needed to change the material data. So I created an Unreal Engine blueprint that could do this. Code details in a my secret place of examples

https://youtube.com/watch?v=paCu2bebp04

#gamedev #UnrealEngine #UE5 #indiedev

I have stopped work on the RPG for today. I have to change some things in the code which does the calculations when resources are dropped off. I think it's using a default value occasionally, suggesting that an enumeration was essentially zeroed before it was used. 🤷‍♂️ Once that's out of the way, I can add combat to this basic state tree, and begin to get rid of behavior trees.

#UE5 #RPG

My son, a 12 year old Half Life fan, recreated some gameplay in Unreal Engine. He did it on the weekend and everything himself, I didn't help him. He took the sounds from the game Half Life 2. He doesn't know how to create VFX yet, but I'll show him how Niagara works when he wants. He's made all the effects here with simple objects and materials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVYT7ZN7XA8

#unrealengine #gamedev #gameplay #indiedev #halflife2 #UE5

I wound up moving variables from the state tree to the NPC. It has stabilized behavior, and the NPCs are making no errors that I can see.

Caught a bug I had introduced. I had saved the enumerated value of output from a random number generator, which was twice converted into that enumeration. Instead of using the output of the save operation, which would return the same value, I had erroneously used the output of the final conversion in a switch statement. No no no. That re-runs the random number generator.

"Whee! Houston, we're headed for the moon! Wait. No. Now we're headed for the sun! Hold on. Jupiter! Oh, crap. The sun again, and the software seems to be stuck."

"Oh. Roger, Narcissus I. Steve connected the wrong output and input again. He does that, sometimes. I think he's taking a nap. Or he's reading the book on his face. No. It's a nap. Definitely a nap."

"CAN WE GET TO THIS NOW, PLEASE?"

#UE5 #RPG