Laser

 Author: Daniel Jackson

The laser is the final weapon we needed to be finished with all of the base weapon systems. However, because it behaves completely differently from all of our other weapons it needed its own system to function properly. The player firing it, its construction, and its collision checks all had to be built from scratch using different functions for each. 

For this, I created a new class for the laser itself to handle its construction. I limited the player only being allowed access to one laser at a time and constructed one if the player had no laser assigned to them. If they did the laser would grow in size (assuming it's maximum radius hadn't already been reached). The collision acts as a raycast from the one firing it, forward until it hits a wall. After which, it constructs a capsule stretching from the start point to wherever on a wall the collision was registered with the current radius of the laser. If an enemy is within the bounds of the capsule damage is delt to said enemy. If the player runs out of ammo at any point (or the button is released) the laser decreases down to nothing, is deleted from the world, the removed from the player.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adding assets to every enemy -- Owen Meyers

Image
      As with every game, it is very important to have assets to denote which enemy is which. Being able to tell at a glance what enemy you are encountering before receiving a face full of buckshot is incredibly important. The issue for Project [REDACTED] is that we didn't have any artists working full time to deliver assets for the enemies. Thus, it fell upon me, the designer of the asset pipeline, to acquire assets for every enemy. This led to having to fix models and integrate animations, with each problem being subtly different.     Take, for example, the shotgunner model. His original model was designed for an OpenGL renderer, and was flipped 180 degrees for that very reason. In addition to this, he was also placed halfway in the ground, likely due to something required for that game's collision to function. Fixing this model to function for our renderer required that it be re-rigged and most of the animations acquired from Mixamo. With the help of Kris, and several hours
Read more

Sphere to AABB collision

       I had a problem today when trying to detect sphere to AABB collision. For some reason the collision check that I made was never turning true even though I could clearly see the sphere hitting the AABB. This was a big problem as we needed this collision to detect whether any entities are hitting walls.     I discovered that the problem with this bug was that I was improperly getting the closest point in the AABB to the sphere. The way I fixed this problem this problem was by getting the max vertex that the circle center could be and using that to get the closest point on the AABB to then determine the minimum vertex between the sphere's max vertex and the max of the AABB.  Once I found this point, I could properly compare the distance of that point to the center of the sphere. This solution will allow detection between walls and any sphere collider such as the player collider, and enemy collider. This is very important to make sure they both stay within the level bounds.
Read more