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This week has been fixing logic errors and outright crash errors that we have been encountering for various things.

So I started with a crash error that has been occurring with the "loot" that our enemies drop on death. For whatever reason, in release build, the random range that gets pulled from to determine what loot is spawned is sometimes out of bounds of the array.

After checking through my code, and after having my teammates check through my code as well, none of us have been able to understand this error. The crash appears in the editor on rare occasions (as shown in the image above), but mostly appears in release build. A friend recommended that I check if the error might be caused due to the packaging of Unreal moving something to the wrong location or maybe the packaging of our Install Creator. I checked both but have not been able to replicate the issue and my teammates have not encountered this issue again this week. We have not changed anything nor do we know what is different.

After that I have been working on my "EnemySpawner" object which has two logic errors as of now: On start up it spawns every enemy all at once, and sometimes it causes a (unreal thinks it is) infinite loop. The infinite loop turned out to just be unreal making a fuss about how I did the blueprint. The engine does not like having a Delay in a While Loop for some reason, does not matter where I place it nor how small I make the delay, without the delay I have not had this issue since.

As for the instant spawning of all enemies, I am trying to figure out why it does that. I added a delay to the beginning of the function for 0.5 (seconds I hope but this is probably ticks), but with that it seems to only spawn two enemies and then stops altogether. Any advice would be appreciated.

Finally, I have been working on my level to account for some complaints I received about there being no lights after you kill all the enemies and that the flashlight is not automatically turned on when you enter the level.

Hello and Happy New Year. Unfortunately not a lot was accomplished this week for one reason or another, but I finally fixed a bug that I was having trouble with with changing the animation blueprints in code (turns out I was overthinking the heck out of it and I should have done it in blueprint from the get-go). As for ammo drops from the enemy upon death, I started working on it but have not made much progress. Will post an update next week.

Hey guys, while this week has been a bit of a fiasco due to Thanksgiving, I have been working on firearms. I started the week by migrating the last of the functionality from our old PlayerBase code (which we are deprecating because we have switched to a new player input set thanks to Rob). This took much longer than I would like to admit, but it is done now and so I should not have to mess with anything from their again going forward.

The next two things I worked on were weapon recoil and ADS. Before I get to the recoil, which has some things that I think are problems, I would like to first state that Rob and I got the ADS to work like a charm and I'm super happy with it although it feels really weird to implement it with actors and not actual cameras.

Now, the recoil functionality was not to difficult to implement once I wrapped my head around it, but I was overthinking the hell out of it for a while. Thankfully it works now, but I am still worried that the implementation is too jarring as it automatically switches from the current X & Y to the updated X & Y. I could just be overthinking this and it works just fine, but any recommendations on how I could make it feel less jarring would be appreciated. 

The second thing that currently has me worried with the recoil is that it does not currently "snap back" to an idle rotation after you are done firing. It probably is going to be super easy to implement, but I am having trouble wrapping my head around implementing it. Again, any advice is appreciated.

Next I made a Sidearm object and started working on the functionality. Thankfully we found an asset for the sidearm that looks great, but I am a bit worried that it is angled strange. With where it is currently angled, the forward (red) arrow is to the side, the sideways (green) is downward and at an angle, and the upwards (blue) is forwards and downward at an angle. The images below show it better. The only reason I am worried about this is that I think it will affect the bullet shooting when I finally implement the sidearm, but I don't know for sure if it will until I finish the Animation Blueprint for the player to go with the sidearm. 

The final thing that has me REALLY stressed is trying to implement weapon switching. No matter how I try to do this, it all seems weird and I am just having trouble wrapping my head around it. I first tried to implement it with the scroll wheel but I could not get the inputs to work. After several hours of trying that, I decided to scrap it and switch to just using the "1" and "2" buttons for equipping the first and second weapon. But now I'm trying to find a way to switch the ChildActorComponent to the new weapon after switching. I feel like there is a way to do this but I may not be searching for it correctly. 

AH! After ten thousand years I'm finally free of paperwork. Alex here. Spent most of this week on paperwork, but I also spent some time trying to better our firearm functionality. A lot of the original functionality for the firearm (s) that we had implemented was placed in the Player for convenience and to meet deadlines which just made it confusing to debug. So I've been moving that out of the player and making a "Base Weapon" from which all our firearms can derive from. Not much of a problem, but to make sure we make as few doubled sections of code as possible and make debugging as convenient as possible later down the line that's where I decided to focus coding for now.