Creating an MMO-style controller in Unreal Engine

March 22, 2015July 28, 2015jacobshughes 2 Comments

For the last little while I’ve been teaching myself Unreal Engine. Recently, Epic Games made it completely free to use for anyone, which I think is an absolutely amazing idea. It could possibly be fundamental for pushing video games even further by getting future developers hooked.

Since I’m learning from the ground up, I wanted to create an MMO-style control system, using the blueprint system, based on the third person template available. Control systems are pretty fundamental in video games, and I have some very specific memories of completely giving up on well known titles because of bad input design.

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Dinner at Akiba

February 24, 2015jacobshughes Leave a comment

Recently went to @AkibaCBR for dinner. We both chose the “Feed me!” option to get 8 choices from the chef. Missing a couple of photos since the dishes were devoured too quickly!

Very good restaurant and very well priced for the high quality and quantity.

Table seared (by blowtorch) sashimi

Kingfish sashimi

Kimchi pancake

Of course – dumplings

Pork buns, in the form of sliders. These were my favourite

Slow cooked beef

Mango and coconut sticky rice

Abilities and cooldowns with Unreal Engine and UMG

February 23, 2015jacobshughes 1 Comment

For the last couple of days I’ve been working on implementing a test UI as part of an abilities framework.

When you click an ability, it has a recharge time (cooldown) before you can use it again.

This is the visual scripting code for that:

The whole script in Unreal Engine – looks like a mess to me…

I wanted to make sure that the information about the ability (so far just the cooldown) is not contained in the UI, but in the class of the ability itself. This will help with what I hope to add later, which is the option to choose from a selection of skills. Then you can change your skills to match the situation – platform too high? Swap to a Super Jump ability!

Here’s the UI in action, with the cooldown effect:

(If this doesn’t work, it is also on YouTube here. YouTube is also better quality!)

TODO: Make the skills actually do something! All they do so far is print a debug message…

I made a thing!

February 21, 2015March 26, 2015jacobshughes Leave a comment

New website!

Hello! Hello?

I’ve been waiting a while to do this. Hopefully this site will collect all the various online tools I use together into one spot – and people will actually look at it.

I’ll be filling up the pages here over time, hopefully to highlight all the things I’ve done I feel are brag-worthy.

For now, there are a few pages.