crussel

Builtin A* Pathfinding in Unreal Engine 4.25

A few years back I wrote Neatly replacing NavMesh with A* in UE4 and ever since I’ve had a vague notion that it’s probably gone wildly out-of-date. As it happens I was recently working on another project that would benefit from A* and I noticed UE4 already has an A* implementation called FGraphAStar, so IContinue reading “Builtin A* Pathfinding in Unreal Engine 4.25”

Just Cause-style wingsuit/grapple/gliding

I’ve clocked up over 60hrs on Just Cause 3, and most of it is just gliding about with the wingsuit. There’s something very compelling about that calm beauty intersersed by moments of complete panic as you very nearly smack into a tree/car/tower block. I wanted to have a go at recreating that same feel, and IContinue reading “Just Cause-style wingsuit/grapple/gliding”

VR Hub / Apartment Trashing Simulator

As part of the International Festival for Business last week I helped out at Realspace’s VR hub in the Liverpool Science Centre. Realspace have recently set up, amongst other things providing a space for local businesses to experiment with VR. They knew I was working on a VR game and asked if I could demoContinue reading “VR Hub / Apartment Trashing Simulator”

For The Loot!

Match details: join us tonight 20:00 BST (GMT+1), Steam has to be running, and change your download region to UK/Manchester. I’ll be hosting as ‘chrismcr’. Download the post-jam game here! Last weekend I took part in my first 4-day #ue4jam, as part of the Sleepless Beanbags team. The theme was ‘fire in the hole’ so obviouslyContinue reading “For The Loot!”

Escape in UE4

Just over four years ago, for Ludum Dare 23, my friend Pete and I made a game called Escape in C++/OpenGL. The theme was ‘Tiny World’, which we chose to interpret as ‘the level shrinks as you play’. Inspired by the red weed from H.G. Wells’ War of The Worlds we decided the player is stranded onContinue reading “Escape in UE4”

Unity Visibility/Fog of War Effect

Here’s a method for ‘fog of war’ from an old Unity project. This is the kind used in games like XCOM where the world geometry outside the visible range of your units is darkened, but still at least partially visible. I added a circle mesh (an extremely short cylinder will also work) to the player unitContinue reading “Unity Visibility/Fog of War Effect”

VR Molecular Visualisation

So this was a fun little demo I put together for a client: the first chain of insulin (apparently, I’m not a scientist!) loaded from a CML (Chemical Markup Language) file and displayed as a model in UE4. There are over 400 atoms and ~1200 bonds iirc, so I used one instanced static mesh per atomContinue reading “VR Molecular Visualisation”

UE4 Quick tip: ‘X-ray’ material

One of my prototypes needed an ability for the player to see certain objects through walls. I didn’t want the objects to be visible at all times, just when the player looked directly at them. To prevent an object being obscured by the objects in front of it we just need to disable depth testing, which we canContinue reading “UE4 Quick tip: ‘X-ray’ material”

Neatly replacing NavMesh with A* in UE4

[ Update: Builtin A* Pathfinding in Unreal Engine 4.25 ] I’ve been working on a tile-based game recently, and I wanted to use A* for pathfinding (NavMesh is overkill, and not a great fit). I could’ve just written an A* pathfinder and custom AI code that uses it, but I wondered if there might be aContinue reading “Neatly replacing NavMesh with A* in UE4”