I’m working on modular vehicle.
In this thread I will be publishing my progress.
Features:
3 game-ready vehicles: 2K48 “Skythe”, 2K46 “Discovery”, 2K44 “”
All blueprints structured and well-commented
N-wheeled vehicle support
HUD support
Customizable PBR master material for vehicle
Camouflage support (up to 3 masks)
Different anti-stuck measures(savepoints, automatic and manual respawn, wheel jumpers)
Customized first person character to play
Ability to enter/exit vehicle
2 types of camera for vehicle.
Camera zoom.
Demo landscape
Simple Day/Night cycle
Basic enemy character AI: can find target and attack
Basic enemy vehicle AI: can find a path to waypoint, can follow to the target
Basic enemy aircraft AI: can fly to waypoint.
Health/Damage system(with environment support)
Material for destroyed vehicle/aircraft
Cloaking field support
121 vehicle parts
Headlights
APEX destructibles
7 projectiles blueprints, including laser, different types of bullets and rockets with different targeting capabilities.
Rocket turret
Rocket pod
Laser turret
Gatling gun
Mine trawl/Grinder
Railgun
Anti-Air turret
Flamethrower
Generator module
Stoppers
Cargo Bay
Number of Blueprints: 80
Number of Meshes: 143
Number of Textures: 110
Number of Materials: 42
Number of Audio tracks: 11
Number of Audio Cues: 11
Number of Effects: 14
Number of Animations: 4
Number of C++ classes: 4
I added animations for turret and stoppers.
Also, turret now can fire with guns and rockets.
Two types of cameras are available: basic and free.
Turret works as a standalone controllable pawn, so it can be used anywhere.
Stoppers activates handbrakes, stops vehicle and prevents it further movement until they will be deactivated.
The first attempt to make destructible meshes in PhysX Lab by Nvidia to get more control over chunk behaviour.
Also in video you can see new module for vehicle: Gatling gun.
Each module can be placed anywhere and activated/deactivated through module interface.
nice work so far, as for the destructables i suggest fixing the bottom section to the floor, it just 1 or 2 clicks in apex, been that long since i touch apex stuff !
I made some improvements in materials.
Now there is a master material for vehicle and global vehicle material instance, to change material parameters for all vehicle parts.
Each vehicle part now using the material instance, so it’s also possible to tune only some parts of the vehicle.
I’m planning to use this feature to add some effects(like a force field, cloaking field) to materials in future.
I’m all for ‘customize-enabled’ modular vehicles and this is looking real sweet! I would say the more granular the modular parts are, the better. I can easily visualize customized weapons and armor pieces: Gun turret, Rocket turret, Gatling gun, Rocket pod, Shields.
New corpus - 2K46 “Discovery” - ready to discover wastelands.
Corpus features: 2 ultrasonic scanners, laser guidance system, EMP generator
New module: Flamethrower.
New feature: Headlights.
I added support for PxVehicleDriveNW, so now all 8 wheels work physically correct(+/-, but before that I used copy bone node in animation blueprint).
I also spent a day by tuning different vehicle settings, so now the vehicle is more stable when driving(landscapes, which I made previously, helped me a lot with seeking the bugs).
What’s new today:
Modular vehicle class hierarchy improvements
Wheels SFX
Simple Day/Night cycle
Ability to enter/exit vehicle
Anti-stuck measures:
Savepoint every minute
Manual respawn to the last savepoint
Auto-respawn on stuck to the last savepoint
As a last resort, I’ve added jumpers as an anti-stuck device.
I added simple character AI, which follows to the player if it is in attack range(also I can execute attack method, but currently it’s doing nothing).
Also after death of AI, it will activate ragdoll physics for body.
There are also a lot of invisible improvements.
I’ve improved navigation system for vehicle AI. Now I’m building path to the waypoint by using NavMesh data, if it’s possible. It means that vehicle can avoid different objects in level. It’s not support dynamic path rebuilding, which means if path to the waypoint was builded, then vehicle will try to go there even if level structure was changed.
To fix that, I’ve added some logic to avoid objects dynamically.
I’m not using linetrace for that, because I don’t know final form and size of the vehicle(due to modularity). Instead of this, I have smart movement checks. For example, if vehicle going stuck, I’m trying to change vehicle direction. There is a lot of different parameters to customize vehicle movement logic.
In video you can see work of current navigation system. Because current vehicle is rather big, it’s harder to set proper acceptance radius for waypoints(big value will be better for plain landscapes and low values for cities for example). Still need to adjust some timing parameters to react faster on collision with other objects, but it’s better than nothing and I will try to improve it later. White spikes are navigation points of current path to waypoint(they were added for debug purposes). It will be great, if somebody can advice me some tricks on how to improve navigation for vehicle.
