What do you want to see in Testing Grounds?

Unreal Courses Talk
#1

Many of you have expressed a wish for the sections to be kept smaller and for us to have more of them. So we want to wrap up Testing Grounds as quickly as possible while still making it a complete and great section.
So far we still definitely need to cover the following:

  • Footstep sound effects, overview of methods.
  • More AI debugging.
  • Random AI spawning.
  • Random terrain spawning.
  • AI locking the current ground.
  • Unlocking when all AI are dead.

Is anything vitally important missing from this list? Please bare in mind that we cannot fit everything otherwise the section will get too large.

Cross posted also to the Facebook group.

Who would you prefer finishes this section?
#2

The gun passing though the wall (Mentioned to be fixed).
Shadows of Fp and TP character (May be fixed in the combining of tp and fp i havent got that far yet)
Removal of corpses (Destroy object although i did this already in another project)
Timer to complete section and if not it resets.

Thats all i can think of at the present moment

#3

How do you imagine the resetting works?

#4

One of the flaw in a game i have found is if the player can hide forever from a enemy then the game will never progress. So in a sense if they havent cleared the area within say 2 minutes then any dead enemies or current progress is reset (Either by respawning enemies or destroying and respawning). This can be avoided by clever positioning.
The other reason for this is game protection. If something quirky happens and it is to a point you cannot complete the area then the game resets the area (Stuck mob or player in wall which shouldnt but can happen).
I imagine using the Begin Overlap that we use to spawn the tiles in can start a timer and if the timer is already going IE complete the area before the timer then it resets when entering the next section.

It reminds me of back when i was playing with MUD that a certain mob got stuck in the code somewhere and wouldnt spawn so we could reset the area manually to force it to correct itself, Same principle just on a timer.

Hope this clarifies and is not too big to go in as i think its just adding to what we have already.

#5

What I had in mind at the moment is that if you can sneak through a ground without getting seen you can get out. But perhaps once the ground is locked there is some kind of bomb set?

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#6

I see what you mean it remains unlocked until you are spotted (or heard if we get that far) and then it locks the section.
A bomb is a great idea in that if the level is locked it counts down until the bomb explodes and you start from the begining. It would be a little irritating for a player if say they glitched and got stuck in scenary and lost progress, (Rather than it reloading the current area and keeping score) but it does get around the issues i mentioned. :slight_smile:

#7

It’d be really nice if you created a C++ version of the testing grounds section. Despite this being a C++ course almost the entire section is done in blueprint. While this does create a functional game and there are many things to be learned, much of this information can easily be found elsewhere. Those of us looking for quality C++ content are left hanging. There is a lack of good C++ tutorials for UE4, and while this course starts out great in that direction the lack of C++ in what should be a flagship section of the course is sorely disappointing.

Sure it may be easier and faster to do things in blueprint, it’s also a messy language and to get more complicated it’s IMO easier to do a lot of things in C++. Maybe this is because I’m a programmer, but I also bought this course in particular because it was listed as a C++ course, not a blueprint course. Throughout Ben’s sections he would sometimes prototype in blueprint (which was sometimes frustrating itself), but then he’d say, “but this is a C++ course, so we want to do this in C++” and go on to refactor that code into CPP. But Sam states it’s easier to do things in blueprint unless you need C++ for additional performance so we’ll just do it in blueprint. However, without foundation level C++ knowledge (which should be provided in this course), for AI programming, procedural level generation, and such, how would one go on to build more complex and performance efficient C++ versions - well I guess we’re left to our own devices to figure out how to do that.

I am severely disappointed in this section of the course (and I’ve seen from the comments and questions that others are too); I hope that you guys rework it in C++. I personally have stopped this course several times because of a frustration with the amount of blueprint in it. The only reason that I’ve come back to the course at all was to challenge myself to rewrite much of it in C++, which I have done. However I’m currently at an AI section and since the AI programming is all pretty new I’m not really sure how to refactor that into C++ without some direction, it’d be really nice if this course could provide the guidance I’m looking for.

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#8

I think this might be the plan when @Gavin get’s to remastering it.

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