Fixed our procedural music system. It was previously stopping and also wasn’t playing tales to tracks.

Changed the endless arena level to properly be using level streaming.

Fixed the compiling shaders screen, it was previously not getting attached and wasnt updating its progress bar.

Updated our main menu cubemap.

Created a copy of the endless arena level with a bunch of tweaks including a new NPC vs NPC spawner for us to take screenshots and cinematics in.

Hid some components that were still set to show during gameplay that shouldnt have.

Packaged a few dozen builds in an attempt to fix a loading error.

Recorded a bunch of footage in the headset in preparation for some tutorial videos.

Started the process of getting an initial build for the pre alpha up on the store.

Spend most of the previous day working on the codex and the script for the intro and announcer tutorial barks. Coming along pretty nicely.

Adjusted the volume of the spell failed sound.

Added a particle effect for when you fail to cast a spell, the sound didn’t seem like enough to tell the player what was happening

Adjusted the location of the back and hip arrow quivers they were way too far backwards.

Adjusted the size of the arrow overlap which allows the player to grab arrows. Previously you’d basically have to grab the quiver to get an arrow, now you can grab around where the actual arrows visibly are.

Disabled the armor merging system for the player because it broke armor equipping.

Turned off the visibility of the helmet when equipped

Added SnapTurningBlink variable to the game instance.

Added SnapTurningAngle variable to the game instance.

Added SmoothTurningSpeed variable to the game instance.

Added snap turning angle to the gameplay options menu.

Added smooth turning speed to the gameplay options menu.

Added snap turning blink option to the gameplay option menu.

Added in the temp player hit reaction sounds for the pre alpha.

Added AllowPlayerHitReactionSounds variable to the game instance.

Added Allow player hit reaction sounds option to the gameplay options menu.

New hardware

Spent most of the day experimenting with the new Galaxy XR headset the hope is to port heartlands to it.

Also helped Jackie and Megan with VFX and material stuff respectively

Got spell casting finger animation kind of working, its not perfect because it isn’t blending perfectly with the regular hand animation, but its a great start!

Reduced the likelihood of NPC switching weapons from melee to another type, was happening far too often.

The grip line was still set to show debug on the weapons.

The debug information for magic strafing is now turned off.

Created the separate magic effect for the fire channel spell it was previously using the same damage as the fireball.

Created the separate magic effect for the frost sky spell it was previously using the same damage as the frostbolt.

Added some missing report noise events to weapon hits previously only the player was reporting noise events when attacking which means NPCs attacking other NPCs would just stand there unless they saw them.

Added report damage events to weapon hits we previously were only getting visual and hearing stimuli.

Tracked down a bug with the stimuli inside our ai controller we were reporting noise events on the wrong perception component making the newly added damage stimuli to not function.

Added grant experience for staves and wands they were previously only getting experience when hitting someone with them like they were melee weapons.

Added grant experience for the enchanting bench

Added grant experience for the recharging items

Added grant experience for the blocking parrying and shield bashing

Added a new function to the inventory component for Get Number of Armor Skills based on Equipped Armor this returns how many of each skill (Heavy armor, Light armor, unarmored) to allow us to apply a scaled amount of XP to each skill on hit.

Added grant experience for speechcraft mini game

Added grant experience for mercantile

All skills are getting experience from somewhere now!!

Bug fixes continue

Fixed a long standing bug where items like potions, books and misc objects would get duplicated in the inventory.

Fixed a few of the book objects compile errors

Removed a bunch of blocking loads that we had to have previously.

Back from vacation

Been working on PSO caching and optimization stuff for the past two days. Not going great so far. The compiling shaders screen takes over 5 minutes to run on headset not exactly reasonable in my opinion. That being said compiling our shaders removes a lot more of our stutters than i expected!

Road to pre alpha continues

Wrote a new system to Instance the crowd actors went from around 1300 draw calls down to around 30!

Game is now running at 72 with spacewarp 55 without

Fixed a bug where Creatures would play taunt animations intended for Humanoid NPCs

Fixed a bug where NPCs would sometimes not be able to cast spells if attacked by a creature.

Added a lave bubbling sound to the fire golems metasound

Added a fire ember particle effect to the fire golem.

Added Fire resistance to the fire golem.

Added a new interface event for TriedToAttackWithAWeaponTargetIsImmuneto_OnInterface… long name, but basically i just want us to have some sort of trigger in case we want to do something with that information like play a dialogue sound or spawn a tutorial, whatever.

Added an array variable inside the stats component for ImmuneToDamageTypes.

Added the taunt sounds for the ghost

Fixed a bug where the melee component would return a null value when checking for a stunned NPC.

Fixed a bug where NPCs playing a taunt animation would slide around on the ground.

Fixed a bug where we werent doing health damage with shock damage.

Fixed a bunch of components that we set to visible in game that shouldnt have been.

Main menu loading screen is in.

Fixed the misaligned health widgets and block collision proxies

Added the proper ref to the Creature Definitions so they can properly play combat barks

Changed the cooldown values for the combat barks on the creatures to make them more common

Fixed a bug where npcs would keep breathing after death

Fixed a bug where creatures would try to play a two handed blocking animation intended for humanoid npcs

Fixed a bug where hand to hand npcs would try to play a two handed blocking animation designed for weapons.

Created the lesser golem walking metasound

Added the walking sound animation notifies for the lesser golem

Added an interface event for PlayCreatureSeenEnemyAnimation_OnInterface so we can play animations like the golems crawling out of the ground or something.

Fixed animation bugs for the flying vampire it was missing a bunch of animations and was using incorrect animations for the idles.

Created breathing meta sounds for all the pre alpha creatures

Creatures are all working enough for the pre alpha and added to the endless arena spawner.

Spent the past few days working on sound effects for creatures.

Fixed a broken animation blendspace for the giant spider creature.

Fixed a flow of execution issue with where we were playing attack sounds

Fixed Spells not casting properly from the left hand

Fixed wands not calculating spell velocity correctly on the left hand.

Fixed channel spell rotations being backwards on the left hand.

Death sounds variable added to base npc

Created a new event to cache a random death sound

Modified the death event to play the cached death sound.

Added death sounds to all teh creatures for the Pre alpha

Magic bug Fixes!

Curated the creatures we will use for the Pre Alpha Release.

Added the Summon Hellhound spell to the data table.

Added the Summon Ghost spell to the data table.

Updated the Interface event update weight with a new variable for total weight.

Added a new interface event for GetCurrentInventoryWeight_OnInterface

Implemented the GetCurrentInventoryWeight_OnInterface on the player character and the BP AI Parent

Implemented the Event Update Weight_OnInterface event on the BP AI Parent and the Player Character

Fixed the implementation of the Feather magic effect it wasnt working properly and relied on hard references.

Fixed the implementation of the Burden magic effect it wasnt working properly and relied on hard references.

Cleaned up the code in the summon creature code.

Fixed a bug in the Hellhound anim graph that caused them to stop animating

Fixed a bug where Summoned creatures would sometimes treat their summoner as an enemy if they killed all other valid targets.

Fixed a bug where dead AI Characters were still evaluating targets.

Fixed a bug where AI controllers were not being destroyed for dead characters.

Fixed a bug in how summons were destroyed, they were basically waiting double the time they should have to despawn.

Fixed a bug where Summoned creatures sometimes wouldn’t play their being destroyed VFX.

Fixed a bug where summoned weapons wouldn’t play their being destroyed VFX.

Fixed a bug in the VFX placement of Summoned creatures.

Fixed a bug where Ground spells couldnt be cast from the hand unless its was moving as fast as a projectile

Fixed a bug where channel spells would use the wrong path to end their execution.

Removed the old code for casting channel spells from wands, wands now cast projectile spells only.

Fixed some bugs related to the old execution for channel spells related to how we applied damage due to the removal of wands from their execution.

Fixed a bug where player hand cast ground spells would never destroy the hand VFX.

Fixed a bug where player cast hand spells would not activate their VFX.

Updated the Placement radii for all of the rune spells the system changed since they were originally set.

Fixed a bug where player cast rune spells would not activate their placement VFX

Added a validated get for the magic component to the rune casting begin charge, it was causing an error when casting from the player.

Fixed misnamed shock rune and frost fall spell

Implemented spell charge sounds for the rest of the spell types previously they only worked for projectiles.

Added a validated get for the magic component to the self spell casting trigger magic spell event, it was causing an error when casting from the player.

Implemented a bunch of sound effects for the spells for the pre alpha.

Turns out our armor calculations were incorrect in two ways, for one we were using the attackers armor value when calculation a damage reduction instead of the person wearing the armor, and for two the actual damage blocking value was off by 30 percent due to some changes to how protection value is calculated vs the original spreadsheet design.

Fixed a bug where if an NPC killed another npc they would return to their starting place and then pull their weapon back out.

Fixed a misconfigured grip script causing weapons to pass through each other significantly

Realized we were missing haptic effects for a bunch of things so created and implemented haptic effects for Spell charging, Weapon hit fails, Weapon hits, Weapon parries, shield blocks.

Modified the intensity of the holster haptic effect

Implemented the haptic effect for nocking the arrow, drawing the bow string , and firing and arrow.

Added a spell destroy delay of 30 seconds to make sure a spell thrown into the air wont go on forever.

Adjusted the angle of the projectile spell throwing, seems much better now.

Significantly reduced the references in the inventory component

Fought a bunch of the NPCs in the endless arena to test the time to kill and ended up reducing the possible max health pool because enemies were way too spongy.

Work on the creatures and bug fixes continue!

Fixed a bug where non humanoid creatures would lay down on the ground when stunned due to an animation skeleton mismatch

Fixed a bug where humanoid creatures wouldnt get stunned during combat

Fixed a bug where the player would be counted as a valid overlapped actor for the get closest actor check we use in the wrist UI

Fixed a bug in the Wrist UI where the Item name box was set to invisible permanently

Fixed a bug where the previously displayed item info would never be cleared when switching to the Quest info UI

Changed the Quest info Ui to show “No Active Quest” if one is not active, looks better than just the empty panel.

Rewrote the entire system for showing and hiding the wrist UI it no longer shows up when swinging weapons, and has a contextual location for the information pop up when hovering over an item or when showing quest information its right above the anatomical snuffbox on either hand, when holding an item it shows up on the inside of your wrist.

Implemented a temporary UI update particle effect for things like when the player needs to level up or gets a quest update.

implemented the player Death Knell sound effect.

created a new interface event called PlayerNotificationVFXActivate_OnInterface so we can actually activate the new particle effect without a hard reference.

Bound the narrative events for Quest Succeeded and Quest New state to new events in the player character so we can show the New particle effect.

Fixed that super frustrating bug where the NPC inventory shelf was spawning at random angles.

Dozens of tiny fixes to creatures

Cleaned up the code inside of the SpawnAttackAttachment function

Added a variable called Creature_Humanoid to help us use the same paths as the metahuman based characters without the facial setup

Updated the flow of the Setup Weapon range event. Previously we only allowed weapon range overrides on creature weapons in retrospect this was dumb.

Had to do some weird stuff with the goblin 001, due to their animations we actually need to have them use the normal creature path and then spawn a copy of their weapon when they die. Dont love it as a solution, but it works.

Exposed the chance to play a death animation vs rag dolling as a variable.

Fixed missing parry event inside of the Base object it was never being fired due to a missing tag

Re wrote the code for switching from melee to another combat type, previous code worked fine if we had a fully kitted out NPC, but if they didnt have magic or a ranged weapon they would pull put away their weapon and then pull it right back out looked like a bug,

The rest of the creatures are now working to some degree.

Creatures!

Started work today on getting the creature combat fully functional, last time i messed around with it was almost 2 years ago and it .. kind of worked, but needs significant rearchitected.

Cleaned up the code paths for NPC setup to better handle whether we are setting up Human NPCs or creatures including skipping a bunch of strictly human stuff like determining weapons and armor.

Added variable for Creature uses armor and creature uses non attachment weapon just in case we need that at some point as of right now everything for spawning Creature weapons is part of a separate event.

Added an interface event for GetIsCreature_OnInterface and added it to the BP Ai Controller to control which behavior tree we load.

Replaced the old MoveTo event in the Creature behavior tree with the BTGS one

Removed all the refs to attack groups in the setting animal behavior service because we dont use those anymore.

Fixed a bug where we were removing the weapon overlap capsule from attack attachments.

Fixed incorrectly set visibility of the mesh on all the creatures

Fixed a missing animation blueprint on the brown bear creature

Fixed the blendspace for the flying vampire

Fixed the animation blueprint for the flying vampire

Replaced the animations inside the forest guardian attack attachment

Added a tag for the Greater rock golems called Giant so we can do stuff with that like scale the max speed to make them look like big heavy things struggling to move.

Scaled the Greater golems to 1.5 times their normal size to differentiate them more from the lesser golems

Fixed a bug where we werent actually attaching the creature attack attachments to the correct socket

Fixed a bug where we werent actually setting the main hand weapon info inside of the creature attachment code causing us to never use the weapon distance over ride.

Put in a workaround for small spiders in the distance calculations because they dont usually meet the rotation threshold required to be valid due to their size.

Changed the radius of the sphere trace when tracing for damage with attack attachments to make hit detection more reliable.

Fixed a bug where the spider queen was using the wrong attachment item

Fixed missing animations on the twig people

Fixed missing attachemnt on twig person 003

Fixed an execution flow issue in setting a reference to the possessedAI inside the animal behavior tree

Fixed a naming bug in the GetIsStunned_OnInterface function, it was returning MidDraw instead of IsStunned, must have forgotten to change it.

Added the stunned damage multiplier to the calculate damage function.

Cleaned up the code inside of the Calculate damage function it was a bit of a mess

Fixed a bug in the stun calculation

Added a call in editor debug event to our NPC to reset all the skills to 5, why the fuck haven’t i done this sooner. No more tracing down which skills are set in debugging mode.

Fixed a bug in the magic system where we were never resetting the spell loading value if the NPC ran out of magic.

Found a bug where the magic regeneration is happening even if a spell is charged which is a bit broken.

Added an interface event called IsSpellCharged_OnInterface to help us stop the magic regeneration if you or an NPC is actively casting a spell.

Magic no longer regenerates while casting a spell!

The math for calculating spell cost inside the T_DetermineMagicSpell was not using the correct formula.

Fixed a bug where spell cost was being paid twice for NPCs.

If NPCs run out of magic they now have a chance to switch to another weapon if they have one.

Added an interface event for GetHighestCombatSkill_OnInterface this returns what the highest skill is for the Character and whether or not its magic

Fixed a bug where we were still resetting the skills when reevaluating the weapons.

Created a new function in the AI Parent to get the highest combat skill excluding magic. The idea being we need to be able to force the NPC to a different combat method if they are out of magic.

Changed the Reevaluate weapon function to include an input for if we should exclude magic when reevaluating

Fixed a bug in the S_Strafe service causing it to not compile due to the Get is stunned event update.

Fixed a bug in execution flow of new determine highest combat skill functions.

Fixed a bug where the magic regeneration timer was always ticking even when at 100 percent magic.

Fixed a bug where NPCs would spam weapon switching

Fixed a bug where NPCs would sprint around the player while aiming with magic… hilarious to look at but not fun at all.

Added a in interface function to the BTGS Interface called GetMagicPercentage_OnInterface to help us make sure we arent trying to switch to magic combat when we don’t have enough magic to likely be able to cast spells.

Fixed a bug where we would attempt to switch to magic combat while already trying to switch combat causing a loop

Fixed a bug where we would switch to magic when we should have switched to ranged weapons instead.

NPCs can now reliably switch in and out of magic combat based on their amount of magic!

Added interface events for set and get invisibility, we already had events for setting the active state used for things like completing narrative events or updating behavior, but nothing to actually set the actual variable in the stats component… which also didnt exist until now.

NPCs now correctly respond to player using invisibility

Updated how we are clearing targets inside the BP AI Controller

NPCs now correctly respond to players losing invisibility

Fixed the bug where npcs couldnt detect players in bushes.

Fixed the dialogues not being played properly for the endless spawning characters.

Created the new dialogue assets for the rest of the characters.

Generated and imported all the new temp combat barks.

Bug fixes continued

Fixed a large bug where ground spells would still activate their damage on dead targets

Fixed a quite frustrating and persistent bug where NPCs couldn’t reach the player turned out to be an issue with some things blocking the nav mesh.

Generated a bunch of temporary audio lines for combat testing of things like oofs and combat barks.

Fixed some missing audio lines for aviamon.

Created the new dialogue assets for the Nymaa Mid Age Males

Spent a bit debugging why i cant get the new voice lines to play, but havent solved it yet, muts be missing something will have to solve tomorrow.

Optimizations and bug Fixes!

Started the process of optimizing a bunch of the files related to our VFX files a significant point of performance issues for us.

Fixed a bug in the scaling of our crowd actors

Removed the old code and cleaned up the code for reducing magic in the magic component.

Added a loop to destroy all the components in the character when they die instead of having them all plugged into one destroy so we can do an is valid check.

There was a bug where spells that hit anything would give experience and attempt to do damage or effects to it.

Fixed a bug in checking for offhand weapons in the melee component.

Added a validated get for the magic component inside the bp ability parent before reducing magic.

Fixed a bug where spell would never go away if you dropped a charged wand

Fixed a null ref when trying to destroy a slowly cast spell in the player character

Fixed a bug where spawned wand spells would be destroyed if you dropped the wand

Added a lifespan of 30 seconds spells spawned from wands

Fixed a bug where spells hitting weapons wouldnt actually damage the one holding it, this was originally designed this way, but it just isnt fun and looks like a bug to users.

Fixed bug where we would try to stop magic charge on interface on an invalid spell

Added a delay and do once to the crowd sound triggers to make sure we werent just playing a bunch of sounds over each other.

Fixed a bug in the endless NPC spawner where hair would spawn with helmets

Added a function to the BP AI Parent to check if an npc has a backup weapon, this returns a boolean for melee or ranged, purpose is to have a check inside the behavior tree so we can try to switch weapons to melee if player is too close or marksman if they are too far away.

Added an interface event to the BTGS AI Interface called Does NPC Have Backup Weapons this returns a cached value from the previously implemented function to check the same. This cached value is updated every time the character is spawned or reevaluates their weapons

Added a function to the BTGS AI Interface to return whether or not we are currently revaluating the npcs weapon

The NPCs now have a chance to switch to Melee weapons if they have one and you get close to them while they are in ranged combat mode.

Added a cooldown for how often hit reactions can play it was possible for the player to basically permanently stun lock the NPC making things way too easy.

Removed the ref to the old HUD from all the creatures

Removed the old Attack Group checking code from the AI controller, we no longer use attack groups

Removed the old attack group setting code from the AI controller.

Fixed a missing weapon socket on the base skeleton

Fixed a bug inadvertently created earlier when i fixed the null off hand weapon issue in the melee component. Becuase of the new execution flow we were never unsetting the IsAttemptingShieldBash Boolean leading to npcs playing the wrong attack animations and not actually doing any damage.

Added an interface event for DoesPlayHaveSpawnedSpell? I’m sure this’ll come in handy in a bunch of places later, but right now i need it to let the NPC know if a player is using magic as of right now they only understand if the player is holding a melee or ranged weapon.

Added an interface event for GetPlayerSpawnedSpells Returns the left or right spawned spell.

Added the check for magic in the EnemyIsRangedOrMagic function inside the setting ai behavior service.

Adjusted the distance that is considered valid for an npc to be from the player before attacking with a melee weapon they were far too close before. Current calculation is 80 percent of weapon length plus the length of a metahuman arm which is around 90cm I believe.

Fixed a null reference in the top and bottom blocking code for spawning particle effects that would happen if the NPCs shield broke during combat.

Shortened the distance an npc could be from the player when using hand to hand weapons

Fixed a bug in the melee component where we tried to get the world location of a component that didnt exist.

NPCs now have a chance to switch to a ranged weapon if they have one and you get too far from them while they are in melee combat mode.

NPCs now have a chance to switch to a melee weapon if they have one and you get too close to them while they are in magic combat mode.

The combat polishing begins!

Added a new particle effect for when staves are being charged.

Fixed a bug in choosing staves.

Added new socket on skeleton for holding staves

Reworked how we get the socket to attach weapons to, its much cleaner now!

Fixed a bug in the animation graph where weapon stance wouldnt get updated.

Added Staff and Wand as options in the E_WeaponType enum.

Created new wand and staff state machine in the anim bp for these new enum values, they are placeholder for now but work better than what was there.

Shields were never taking durability damage when blocking, thats been fixed.

Fixed bug where NPC to NPC combat wouldn’t activate due to the recent changes to how player combat activates

Fixed a bug where if an NPCs staff casting anim was interrupted like from being hit the charge effect would never go away.

Created a new animation notify for death ragdolling

Fixed a bug in the release magic charge function that would stop a death ragdoll from playing

Ragdolling kind of works now.

Fixed an engine crash when we would ragdoll if still moving using the character movement component

Replaced our physics asset override in our character this one seems to work a lot better less creepy neck stuff

Added a new boolean AvailableForDialogue to the btgs stats component for a better way of checking if we should allow an NPC to start dialogue instead of a bunch of other more complex checks we had.

Fixed the dialogue not starting when using the new tutorial player characters

Cleaned up the weapon range code.

Cleaned up the begin play event for NPCs broke things up into events for better readability

Removed all the old dialogue card code from the BP AI Parent seeing as its now part of its own dialogue UI.

Removed the super old code from the original demo that we used to kill the bandits.

Removed the old facial animation code from when we tried to use a plugin for facial animation before our custom system.

Removed the old code for player weapon swing direction checking, now that that lives in the weapon itself.

Cleaned up the readability of all my recent interface events in the BP ai parent, was looking a bit spaghetti

Created the Endless spawner level and populated some racks with weapons

Added a new event call ResortSpells to the spell inventory component so we can have access to spells added after event begin play We could call learn spell, but this is if we wanted to add multiple at one time easily and refresh all the arrays of spell types.

Fixed a bug where we were never updating the faction of the NPC at runtime causing combat to not start sometimes

Disconnected the mesh merging for now because it breaks armor reevaluation, I think i know how I wanna fix that just gonna be time consuming and isnt the highest focus tonight.

We apparently never actually connected the armor equipping function to the revaluate armor function fixed that.

Created an Endless Arena Spawner manager that can randomize armor, weapons, and spells of NPCs and then spawn them in one at a time although there isnt really a reason that couldn’t be more.

Fixed a bunch of broken textures on the NPCs… again, really wish epic would fix that bug.

The endless game mode version basically works now albeit with a fair amount of bugs mostly due to player actions or the fact that we have some blocking loads for armor pieces that shouldn’t be there.

Tomorrow it just needs to be played a lot to gather bugs and then fix those, also need to work on the optimization a bit there some defined pain points such as new spells spawning in or new animations loading in.