This tutorial goes over the process for creating a 3rd person follow camera (think Mario 64) within Unreal. Very useful for any platformer-type game especially if you plan to target a game pad as the input system. Keyboard and mouse controls still function reasonably.
Author Archive
Maglev
Maglev (team of 15) tells the story of Tobot; a magnetic robot stuck on a ship with a crazed dictator bent on running their spaceship headlong into a star. It was created in UDK.
For Maglev, I created a generic magnetism component that could be placed on any physics actor within a level. These magnets acted on top of Unreal’s physics system to create magnetic forces between objects. Working within Unreal’s physics system provided interesting challenges to overcome. I also worked extensively on camera and controls.
Devour
My first team game at The Guildhall, Devour (team of 3) is an xbox 360 XNA platformer. I worked on both a Torque 2D version of the game and another within my own 2D engine. Required extensive debugging of the Torque 2D platform and our custom “Guildhall Starter Kit” in order to get working. Had to find and fix a resource accumulation bug that prevented the game from running for more than three levels. In my own engine, I implemented parallax backgrounds, multi-layer rendering, several collision geometries and all gameplay functionality.
Concurrent RTS Simulation
I created an RTS simulation in which two factions fought over control of territory. All processing was done asynchronously in parallel prior to the render pass. Utilized a dual-core Intel processor and found maximum performance between 3 and 5 total worker threads. Also implemented a lockless FIFO using a linked-list structure in order to maintain the process list.
Memory Manager
Created a first-fit memory manager for game engines. The manager can handle memory space partitioning (within sub-managers) and assists in debugging code. Provides help with double deletes, lifetime memory leaks, temporal memory leaks, tracking memory footprints and heap corruption.
Landscape LOD
A landscape displayed from a heightmap and single diffuse texture. Landscapes were from 4-8 million vertices. Regions consisted of 4096 vertices and could be drawn as anywhere from 2 tris to 8 thousand tris. Distance to camera and intrinsic detail bias based determination of which level-of-detail to use. A normal map was also calculated at first load to show consistent lighting despite changing LOD.
Pots on Strings
This math project is similar to a game of paddle-ball except that there are five balls on the string, and the balls are teapots! Teapots were strung together using spring dynamics and allowed to rotate in three dimensions. The teapots act as spherical rigid bodies. The project computes a first-order physics simulation relying on moments of inertia causing both translation and rotation.
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Shader Project
I wrote custom shaders in both DirectX’s HLSL and OpenGL assembly to obtain a three dimensional effect on flat surfaces. My engine utilized three textures (diffuse, normal- and height-map) in order to light the model. I used N•L and specular lighting along with parallax texturing. The models were rendered based on a point light source either from the camera or a point in space. The point light is represented by a blue ball.
Quake III BSP
I integrated BSP into my 3d engine including the ability to load Quake 3 map files. Entire Quake 3 maps could be rendered complete with built-in textures and light maps. Frustum and occlusion culling were performed on the BSP to greatly reduce the poly-count per frame. My engine also supported ray casting on a per-face then per-poly basis while using the BSP to perform in-order search based on distance.
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Magnetism
Memory Manager
Lockless, Threadsafe Queue