PokerNite is finally live! Please check it out and let me know your thoughts! Feel free to share with anyone that might enjoy it.
Island Code: 0004-2034-3582
PokerNite is finally live! Please check it out and let me know your thoughts! Feel free to share with anyone that might enjoy it.
Island Code: 0004-2034-3582
Looks great!
How did you do the UI? A bunch of HUD Message devices?
I’ve been trying to make a board game in UEFN and had convinced myself that it wasn’t possible to use get images on my tiles, so I had come up with a really hacky solution of using a a tool called geometrize to generate a bunch of rectangles and convert that to Verse code with a bunch of color_blocks inside an overlay, and got that working…
…but if there’s a way to avoid generating and copy pasting 36000 lines of Verse script, I’d prefer that
PokerNite uses a combination of 3d prop cards (for the cards actually on the table, being dealt, etc.) and a bunch of UI devices for the cards that are shown as part of the UI, i.e., the ones that are only visible to a single player. It’s a real pain…it requires 52 UI devices + 52 props, and at least early on, UEFN would crash frequently and my @editable arrays would get wiped out and I’d have to painstakingly repopulate the arrays each time.
Eventually I figured out I could add tags to all the devices and props, then have the various custom devices search for all the UI devices with appropriate tags and populate their card arrays automatically. That saved a lot of time. So each UI card has a “UI Card” tag, a Suit tag, and Rank Tag, and the card manager figures out which is which. That has saved a lot of time, and I use it a LOT in PokerNite. (So, buttons to join seats have a “JoinButton” tag and a “Seat” tag, the AI characters all have an “AICharacter” tag and “Seat” tag, etc. As it stands, getting used to using a lot of Tags makes Verse coding more manageable.
That said, with the 24.30 release you can now dynamically spawn props! Which is almost awesome, except you still have to have an array you populate of all your spawnable props, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to create the PPID_ data objects, so it’s still a bit @editable array that’s a total pain to use. Doing anything really dynamically in code is still way too hard.
Having a Verse-accessible UI Image similar to color block would be AWESOME. If anyone at Epic is listening, that would probably be my biggest request right now. (Maybe right next to an actual GUI to replace the awkward UI creation scripting.)
Actually…I take that back. My number one biggest request, by far, is some sort of interactive verse debugger. Having to push changes for every little verse change, then try to debug complicated verse logic with nothing more than a bunch of Print commands in a log is easily my biggest time sink, and it makes debugging complicated logic like AI errors, movement calculations, etc., almost impossible at times. Hence why the AI players in PokerNite are so incredibly dumb…There are only 10 or twenty variables that govern their behavior, but actually tweaking them is such a time consuming painful process right now that getting the game to the point that the AI is decently good is proving to be a monumental task.
@AngularRat very cool! For the UI elements for the cards, did you need 104 devices since any card could be in the left or right slot? Or is there a way to reposition the HUD Message Devices dynamically?
You are correct, 104 devices, 52 for each slot. It was a real pain.
Wow! Thanks for confirming. I’m sure more flexibility is coming wrt the UI
Seems like I would need 476 devices for what I was planning, and I think you can’t have more than 5 or so? hud widgets at the same time on different layers so I think it wouldn’t work either way
I don’t know what the limit is for number displaying at same time…In my case I was switching only 2 on at a time. (Actually I used a couple other HUD devices for different things, but generally not all at the same time.)
If you’re trying to create a really complicated UI…yeah, it’s tough. I’ve heard of people actually creating graphics with hundreds of tiny color boxes, but that seems to complicated for me. I know there are also some people creating some pretty impressive UI stuff with post process effects and very complicated materials, but again…nothing easy.
Hey there! Great game! How much to transfer ownership? Just wondering.