Player progress and Animation troubles

My main task this week was getting the basics of all the player's core actions done, and going into it, I was expecting it to be more self contained that it really was. I set up an interact ray for the player and corresponding interactable interface, but then this required working a lot with Luna to get the items set up.  I set up sounds for the player, which had to interact with what Riley had set up for the audio player, and similarly had to set up godmode for when they added the cheat codes . I needed to set up the actual pause functionality for Johns pause widget, and when I set out to make the player's attack, I did so in a way where the player and enemies  would use the same weapon system via base character, which meant working with Jay to iron out some unexpected consequences of such a system . 

Overall, while I knew that being responsible for the  Player(and related things) would mean having to touch many other parts of the game, it was an interesting experience to be in that position on a team so large.  I found each task taking much longer than originally anticipated as it required working with each team member and making sure systems were working on both ends, and that we were both on the same page about functionality and interactions.  Not mention the usual struggles with perforce, and making sure everyone had everything. (we are getting better with perforce, but it is still a major pain and the source of many of our problems)

Aside from all that, the biggest hurdle this week was absolutely animations.  I set up the weapon/attacking for the player near the start of the week, and then literally everyday went in with the intent of getting the attack animation done, but each time hit some kind of wall. What I'm learning is that there are a lot of subtle differences between UE4 and UE5 animation systems, as well as many hidden complexities that arise when using non-default unreal assets.  Since there weren't any attack animations in the asset packs we had got so far, I set my sights on Mixamo and tried to import a swiping attack animation i liked. How much more complicated can it be than just dragging and dropping I thought. Well, first the animation isn't in unreal format. Also you need to choose a skeleton to map it to, but that skeleton isn't the exact rig for the animation so if you import, it will modify the skeleton. Ok, sure, ill make a duplicate of the skeleton I'm using for the player. Ok, now you loose access to all the animations previously for that skeleton. Also, the import crashes your game and never succeeds. Sick.

After struggling with this and similar problems and not making any headway, I decided that I would just use the assets we had, and use a sub-ideal asset for attacking for now, like a jump animation. I figured i could fudge it with the FPS view into a sort of slap or flick. Here I ran into several problem of my own making. The animation script we were using for the BaseCharacter the PlayerCharacter derives from targets the characters mesh, which would be fine, except what I'm trying to animate is the player view model, a sub mesh.  After sorting that out with a virtual 'setupanimations' function in the base character and overriding it....(perhaps not the best way to do it), i moved on to just trying to copy what we learned in previous classes and set up the animation the exact same way.  Best I could considering the jump from UE4 to UE5. Turns out my best wasn't good enough cause that didn't work.  I was sort of able to get a basic walking state set up and playing, but it wouldn't play the attack animation on the slot for whatever reason. Ok, how about online tutorials. Well, they seem to be mostly completely different from what we learned, and often far to large in scope, or far to narrow. It'll require more digging i guess. Later at least I felt vindicated as Jay ran into a very similar problem when trying to set up the attack animations for the AI.  We're hoping to work together an make some progress  on animations in the next sprint.

Here's a quick video covering some things in a bit more detail

Also, just squeezing this in here, but i did a rough UI mockup. It's far from final, but people seem to like it so far. The current concept kind of takes up far to much screen space, so we were looking into ways to reduce the screen clutter and maintain visibility.  We might look at making the objective bar pop out when pressing a key, or reduce the size/complexity of some of the hud elements.  Like i said, far from final. Side note, I spent way to long on that eye for the visibility indicator, (i made 3 variants for 3 different levels of stealth) and did it at way to small of a resolution to be used.