Training Camp Assignment

First off, I want to say how disappointed I was come presentation day with this piece of work. As James Smith and I were creating it, we thought it looked pretty fantastic and we were hopeful of a pretty high mark. Come the class presentations, however, it was clear our judgement of the kind of quality we should be expecting from the rest was somewhat off, so ours was somewhat underwhelming.

And this was a bit of a let down. Determined not to repeat some of the same mistakes made in previous assignments, we started work the day we got the assignment, and it didn't take long for the level to be planned out and basically constructed. Our hangar for the briefing was especially cool, and we thought our "cruise ship mockup" was quite impressive as well. Very Call of Duty 4.

I stayed in Bolton for the holidays whilst James went home, but we still communicated often and effectively via MSN, sending each other updates and discussing what each of us should do next. Through this process we finalised our levels, James sent me the texture for our station approach scene, and we started work on the classes. 

Out of all the classes, the power core one gave me more trouble than anything else. Mainly because it decided it wanted to sotp working after a while. I told it to, upon taking damage, span a redeemer explosion class, play an explosion sound, and then destroy. Which it did! The first time I tested it anyway. And the second time. And a couple more times after that. Then it stopped. This baffled me, I hadn't changed anything in the code, so I went back to it. Sure enough, I couldn't see what had gone wrong. I tried everything - changing the explosion that should spawn, replacing the actor class in the level, creating the class again from scratch.... anything I could think of to sort out the glitch. But it wasn't having it so we ended up having a power node that just vanished with no explosion.

At the end of the xmas hold, we started work on the matinee. Which was just as godawful as I had expected. With two of us working it wasn't quite as frustrating as previous assignments, but was still a struggle. James did alot of the camera work and events whilst I did alot of scripted trigger and mover work. The matinee took quite a bit longer than expected despite factoring in extra time for it, so we ended up having to drastically cut down on our script - which was previously rather ambitious and cool - so that we could get voices recorded and put the work in on time. And this led us to our final problem: Unreal's audio import. Now I have been told by numerous members of our class that the only format Unreal seems to accept is 44khz, 16 bit, mono, .WAV. Well...not on mine it wasn't. 22khz was the magic sample rate for me, and if different instances of the engine like different formats, I'm slightly worried that on someone elses machine it might just get confused and explode.

Overall I'm disappointed with the final result as it couldn't quite meet our ambitions, as usual, and the quality from other groups was higher than I was anticipating making ours look a bit crappy in comparison. If I were to do it again... I'm not sure what I would do differently. I was happy with the way we worked as a group, happy with the planning, happy with the work we split, so I think the only way forward is to get naturally better with the engine.