[Community Project] Real Time Strategy Game. NEW MODELS AVAILABLE. SEE POST #1

I can’t do it right now and I can’t explain it well enough, I’ll program it tomorrow (I’m in Australia) and send it/show it to you :slight_smile:

You can do the transparency thing by adding a scalar material param. Use this param to drive the opacity (alpha channel) of the material. Within the blueprint of the building, we can update this scalar param and that will do the trick. The progress bar is also very similar, except in this case you will use the param and UV coordinate to decide the area to shade.

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Gotcha!

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Ehm… yeah! :slight_smile: I understand every tiny bit you said, but I doubt I could (at this stage) totally transform that into BP and make it work :confused: The whole thing is a bit complex than that, I first need to figure out how to make it so it stays hollow and the worker goes to that building… also I should be able to select building if and only if the worker is selected… But this is yet another thing that we need discussion about… Do we want this type of style, ie worker builds an object, or a red alert style, where you click on a building, it goes in queue and after it’s done you just place it in world… I prefer the first method… :slight_smile:

A similar system is used in Tropico games. Instead of just changing the opacity, they show the building progress. They have like 3 or 4 different meshes for each state of the construction. Initially all we have is just the basement (this appears the moment we place it), then teamsters will get there and start construction, based on number of pending buildings, the number of teamsters available will vary. We can see them doing stuff like swinging their hammers, using the pix-axe… After a while the building mesh changes to another one, and another one and finally the real mesh comes in.

I was able to achieve something similar as a sample. What I did is in the Building blueprint, I added an Array structs of extra static meshes (apart from the default one). With each mesh I also specify a percentage. In the tick function, I check if the current building completion and change the static mesh component to the appropriate static mesh. I did not do the teamsters, however. I will try to find that BP and post it . I did it a couple of months ago and forgot where I put it.

I definitely know what you’re talking about, played Tropico! :slight_smile: BTW, same system could be used when building is being attacked… Imagine if a building is being attacked, we could set it up so that when it goes below <80% health is shows it a bit damaged (bonus points for animating the destruction using animation inside UE4) and another one at <40… etc…

Hope you find them :slight_smile:

Animating the destruction wont be necessary, we can fake it with some particle effect with GPU sprite and a big dust cloud. We switch the mesh and the cloud will hide this from the user :cool:

Haha well that’s another way to go… :smiley:

Don’t tell anyone, the users can’t know!

Anyway, i’ve pushed a new idea to my branch and feel free to check it out.

It’s a basic hud and i would like your feedback on if i should invest more time in this. What i’ve got cost me about 15 minutes and i’ve got some ideas for expanding and improving so it can get better than it is now.

Would love to help you with this once I get more familiar with UE4. Amazing work so far!

Edit: Would it help if we all use an IRC channel? Join #unrealrts on irc.freenode.net

Music

Hello everybody,

It took longer than I thought, been pretty busy. However, is some possible music for the game. There’s only one track for now but I will continue to add to it. You can use whatever you like for this project that I post on the soundcloud page. I will create a playlist for the team to choose from so everyone knows which music is available for use. Just give credit and I’m happy.

You can leave any feedback as well. If I add something I will just bump the thread stating update available.

Talk to you all later

https://soundcloud.com/isaacnichols/a-challenge-lost

:slight_smile:

Hey , you mean about that small icon in top right? Well it’s nicer than before, but wouldn’t it be better if we go for some standardized look, like having all the building buttons down, along with commands we can issue to our units… Or do you want to on purpose go with unique style? I think it would be good to have some kind of a pic underneath the actual building icon, some HUD frame of some sort…

P.S. Were you the one who updated the building placement as well?

@Myll
Come, join… We need variety of people :slight_smile:

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Holly molly, I like it! Feels really relaxing for build time and harvesting crops :slight_smile:

About HUD.

I am assuming we are going to use UMG or Slate. I any case I think instead of doing it right away, we need someone to design the HUD on paper first. We should identify the different types of controls/UI components we ill need. After that we could extend the UserWidget and create new abstract UI components (like Toggle button, Dropdown selector, Accordion…). That is the best wayt o do this. Otherwise there is going to be too much interconnection between UI and Gameplay code and it wont be easy to change one without touching the other. I’ve been working on UI programming for the last 2 years (not in UE, mostly using Javascript) and I have run into similar problems. So if someone could come up how the HUD looks, and how we interact with it, taht would be great. After that we will discuss it and make modifications…

HTML+CSS+Javascript is the easiest way to do HUDs or other interfaces. But unfortunately I am not very happy with the current state of UE4 plugin implementations. With HTML5, animations can also be done with css and it can even mimic 3D!

About modular Map:
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I tried your suggestion to use planar modules and they seem to work!. The only problem is the edges of the map looks ugly (everyone can see our map is like an egg shell). I put some dense fog around the edges to hide this. However we are not just limited to flat terrain, we need some ramps…which definitely need other faces. But lets see where it takes us.

Hi team,

Will this game have various barracades i.e. wooden fence, brick wall, stone wall etc? I can probably whip up some assets that can be used for procedural purposes. I use blender.

I think those will come in handy. Thanks !

Well it was just proof that it was working and easy to use, no actual thought was behind the location except it being easy.

And i did update the building placement, did i break something?

You are right about the interconnection between UI and Gameplay code and that’s a good reason for me to stop working on it :slight_smile:
Can we use Slate without c++? I thought UMG is supposed to be the Blueprint alternative to Slate.
I started this because I thought Coherent wasn’t an option and UMG is still not stable and good enough.

At the moment UI is the one thing that feels inadiquate in UE4. I saw a plugin by one of the community members that provides HTML/Javascript UI (I think irt was something like VaQual UI?). Havent tried it myself yet.

Once I had integrated webkit engine with DX11 to display an html page on a plane. But I am not familiar with UE4 source code. Otherwise I would have tried to integrate webkit so taht we can create html interfaces.

At the moment, what we can do is try to implement it using Canvas, which is pretty stable atleast

It is definitely possible for us to use UMG, it’s a fantastic tool, and fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are a few problems with it though, but they will be fixed in the soon to be released 4.5. :slight_smile:

I am using Canvas, after working on a Canvas based GUI for UDK in a community project I thought I might be able to create something useful.

soon to be released 4.5? I thought that would take quite a while, that’s why i started on a temporary alternative.

@ - well alright… I mean, in theory at least I don’t get it why we’re getting that problems with edges anyway, like you said, no matter how much a terrain is deformed or not, we’re not saying any of the 5 other faces…if tiles are combined well enough…

Actually… I just thought of something… If you know like what merging vertices means in 3D modeling program, like taking two vertices that should exist at same point and turning them into a single vertex… is it possible that you’re seeing that edges artifacts because of that? Like, in editor, when you stack two tile planes so well, their edges should meet and we should get basically two edges occupying the exact same spot? Or are you placing them in a way that two edges lie side by side without every touching them selves? Might be a good idea to have plane tiles for terrain, but combine then while in, ex, Blender and then export the single, combined, merged mesh as a map?

@ - no, nothing is broken, was just curious… :slight_smile:

Since I have zero knowledge about UMG and Slate, and I’m not going to post anything regards to that and instead start studying about both of them…

PS. I’ll be away from my main PC for few days - week… I’m in another city right now, in process of buying a SSD and a second 24’ monitor (yummy) so I won’t be posting anything regarding to models/unreal, except ideas and stuff like that until I get back to my main PC, because laptop can’t handle the unreal madness :smiley:

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What I meant by Edges are not the edges of the mesh. I meant the edgaes of the map. ie The map (assuming it is rectangular) will have 4 edges. And if we dont have a depth for our terrain modules, the players will immediately notice that they are standing on paper. So we either make sure the users wont see the edges of the map clearly and create another set of tiles with extra faces to be used at edges.

About models.
Have you guys looked at turbosquid.com They have a nice collection of models with varying poly count and different pricing. They even have some free stuff.

are some of the models that we might be able to use:

cartoon house max free —> something that looks cartoonish

they also have texture libraries of various qualitites.

UI:

is the link to the free HTML/JS UI plugin for UE4, [Plugin] Web UI framework plugin () - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums
Haven’t tried it myself, but it looks promising.