Week 3 Day 4 - Modding and HUDs
0We started off with an hour talking about your mod projects, specifically two sources of inspirations for making a mod:
1) Things that annoy you about a game
2) Things that you would love to see in a game you play
We talk a bit about scale (don't make it too big or too small) and some common annoyances in some games like Fallout 4 or Path of Exile that we'd like to fix. (And a detour on the interesting currency system Path of Exile uses instead of gold.)
We also talked a bit about culture at game companies, the Blizzard lawsuit, and crunch time.
Then we moved on to talking about Heads Up Displays (HUDs) which are 2D elements on the screen drawn over the 3D graphics. They use (x,y) coordinates where x is the column (starting from the left) and y is the row (starting from the top). This means (0,0) is the top left corner and as y increases you go DOWN the screen, not up.
There is a 100% better way of doing HUDs called UMGs, but they also take more steps to set up and explain. So we just did simple HUDs today. You have four basic tools:
1) Draw a picture on the screen at a certain location, at a certain size
2) Draw a rectangle on the screen with a certain color, location, and size
3) Draw a line on the screen
4) Draw text on the screen with a certain color and size
With these four elements, you can actually make somewhat respectable HUDs. Today, I went through the process of copying a bit of the HUD from Diablo II. I recently purchased some art assets, so I used a portrait of a shady fellow and gave him a name and health bar.
I then showed how to link the health bar to the player's health, and even had it change colors as the bar shrank.
Then we quickly did the same for the AI security guard, but using the Project node to figure out what square on the 2D screen the guard's face maps to, and then drawing a health bar above it. It was right at the end of class, so it doesn't look great - a better approach would be to scale it based on distance, or to hide the bar past a certain distance.