Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Entry 019 - Prototyped Walkable Mainmenu

This time let me present a short glance of the prototype for a walkable mainmenu. The menu items are being switched/scrolled using the arrow keys or the mouse wheel. To active the currently selected item, left klick or enter is being used. It's but only a little test for now and there are several other ideas worth considering.

Mainmenu Prototype - With Walkable Dummy Options Area

You might be asking, why no news for the Energy Cells? Well, I ran into several issues I couldn't resolve due to engine limitations and VR itself. Therefore I stoped working on it (for now) to clear my head to come up with new ideas... and in the meantime the mainmenu sounded like a sweet idea.

Greetings,
Dave

Monday, June 1, 2015

Entry 018 - Visual Feedback & FX

While still trying to find a solution (almost did it) to the carriable Energy Cell, I did a few things to improve the effects for the Slowmotion and the Player Health. So let's get started with the player health:

Player Health - Visual Feedback (left death, right wounded)

As your health decreases, so does the saturation while the chromatic aberration and the vignette effect decrease. For the Slowmotion instead contrast, bloom and motion blur (only noticable in motion) are being changed to get a brighter and more intense image.

Slowmotion - Visual Feedback (left active, right not active)

So how did I manage to do that? If you remember Entry 16 I figured out the "Make Post Process Settings" function and used it to my advantage. The short version of what happened: after a couple of failures (like one special function for everything) I created many variables and a function that does update the post process settings whenever needed.

Custom Post Process Tick Function using Variables

It basically uses variables to update itself. It's being fired using the Tick Event, BUT: there's a branch checking if it is needed at all. So for instance, if the health is above 100 and there is no effect going on it won't be used saving performance. Now the only thing that's left to do is to change the variables in order to create an effect which can be seen in the image below.

Slowmotion FX using Variables to work with the Custom Function

This is a bit more complicated in order to achieve a fade out once the energy used for the skill is going from 100 towards zero. What can also be seen is another custom function called "Set_PostProcessSettings_Reset" to restore the settings to default if the respective checkbox is checked. All of this is but a tiny glimpse and does only represent a small aspect of the entire solution.

Greetings,
Dave