Bug fixes (26th July)

Over the course of the last two weeks, I have mostly been working on bug fixes to get a test version of the level out for release. From the (12th-18th) I was working on issues with AI navigation and trigger boxes along with figuring out why the game performance was dropping in the final level.

AI:

The majority of issues with the AI are now fixed with it simply being a process of fiddling with the AI values. Editing values like: the range for which the enemy will to start firing at the player and which behaviour states to switch between etc. Additionally I have been working on trigger events that will cause the AI to act in a certain way. Below is an example of such an event where the AI will start to invade the house when the player hits the collision box in the attic.

I really want to experiment with features like this as I think it will add greater depth to the player experience.

Performance issues:

When in the final mission I was noticing huge performance issues, especially after running builds. As this level has loads of AI fighting each other (close to 1oo AI in the scene), I thought this was the obvious reason that this was happening so I started to take out some of the AI but noticed no difference in performance. After some time I decided to take away the countdown timer I had in the game. After doing this I noticed a drastic improvement in performance getting a solid 60fps minimum. The issue was that the bomb feature that I added into the game had a timer that would display on screen, this would happen when the player hit the trigger box that would then trigger the count down, it would do this by checking and depleting the time value every tick, this was obviously causing too much pressure on the engine and coursing huge performance issues. Temporarily I have taken this out and it is not in the test build that I have sent out. I am going to be going to a technician with this problem, but looking at online tutorials it seems that what is needed is a loop function that will check to see if the game should end (countdown reaches 0, do something).

Update from the 29th:

The countdown issue is now fixed, the solution was to use UE4 Timer function that triggers events after a set time. This meant that the game wasn’t checking the system every tick thus allowing the game to run more smoothly.

Timer Function

#Gam705MajorProject