Work Experience Journal - Day 9

I tried to fix issues that were leftover from Unreal crashing yesterday.

As I was going back over the tutorial I realised that I had the blackboard based condition on abort self instead of both causing the nodes underneath the decorator to stop working. This meant that if the AI couldn't see the player, it would just stand still.

Upon further inspection, I discovered that I had a trace coming from always success when it should have been on “on success” in the "move to fast" behaviour task. This caused the task to finish even if the "AI move to" can't reach the destination.

After I completed the tutorial I found out that the AI’s shots would come from the centre of the map. After looking deeper into this, I discover that I had forgotten to hook up the break vector to the make vector. This resulted in the shots not lining up with the AI on the Y axis and make them spawn at Y=0.

For some reason the set player focus and the attack animation were linked together. This meant that any tweaks done to either of them would affect the other. So I created a new attack behaviour tree task.

Even though it was a shame that i'd lost a decent amount of blueprints from the crash yesterday. I was able to go back through it and understand more about it what it takes to make AI in Unreal. The logic is similar to one Meccano applies as "there were frequently errors in the instruction manuals to trip small children up" and as a result of this many children gained even more knowledge that what they may have originally gain from it. Problem solving is more certainly the skill I will probably be using the most in the past, present and future. As long as I keep applying problem solving to any hurdle I get to, I can always get over it.

Time Sheet

Weekly - 29 hours 22 minutes and 42 seconds

Total - 45 hours 34 minutes and 57 seconds

Helpful Links

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/AI/BehaviorTrees/NodeReference/Decorators

Harvard Referencing

Sarter, R (2019) Flickering Lights Blueprints; 14 January 2019

Anon (2019) Behavior Tree Node Reference: Decorators. Available from: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/AI/BehaviorTrees/NodeReference/Decorators [Accessed 18 January 2019].

SELMEC News (2016) James May's Top Toys [online]. Available from: https://www.selmec.org.uk/article_2006_01_james_mays_top_toys.aspx [Accessed 18 January 2019].

Anon (n.d.) Wii - Super Smash Bros. Brawl - Zero Suit Samus - The Models Resource. Available from: https://www.models-resource.com/wii/supersmashbrosbrawl/model/10315/ [Accessed 18 January 2019].