"""Finishing""" touches, and getting started on what's next

This week was mostly just clean up. I separated out the audio from the player so the NPCs could have custom sounds, finally got animations working, made a custom animation for the player attack and guard attack.  After that I mostly just fixed random bugs like, assisted with debugging and implementing misc functionality like commands. The big ones were helping Jay with getting NPCs to detect player actions, and helping Luna with getting the player to respawn and lose correctly. 

Animations was the big headache last week, so it was nice to get it fixed early this week. It turned out there was an editor setting in unreal we forgot to set. Go Figure.  After that, i made some crusty attack animations because none of our asset packs had any.  So, yeah, I got to terms with unreal in-engine animation editor, and after using it to make two animations, I must say,  it sucks.  The main problem is that if you press undo, it doesn't undo your last bone movement, instead it undoes every bone movement and reverts to the last keyframe. Similarly, any time the editor autosaves, it also reverts to the last keyframe, and finally, if you ever press S on your keyboard, it will save the current bone, but revert all others. This special cocktail led to me having to remake animation keys constantly, and greatly prolonged the whole ordeal.  I ended up having to remake the players animations 6 times before I finally got a decent one as well, due to not accounting for the player view model being a jerry rigged 3rd person mesh, and it turns out unreal by default doesn't a apply any transform changes you make in an animation, so I had to scrap the one where the players arm shot out like a tentacle.

On the misc stuff side,  I helped set up the NPCs detecting player actions. Essentially they bind to events on the player, and if they have the player in their sight when that event triggers, they do stuff.  We ran into a ton of issues with this because we were binding the events on begin play, and the order of everything between the player, gamemode, and NPCs wasn't happening the way we wanted. Eventually we got it though with a bit hacky use of a timer that doubles as a grace period. 

For Luna, i helped with getting the player to respawn properly. There were a couple of errors here causing fatal crashes, and a couple of logical errors with things getting unset when they shouldn't have, but the main one ended up being caused by a widget that was getting erroneously garbage collected by unreal when hidden from viewport. We made a couple extra commands to quickly kill the player, and eventually determined after finding some dusty forum post, that you have to mark your widget pointers as UPROPERTY(), otherwise they might get garbage collected.

After all that, I began work on a new ability system that will have better support for future abilities. 

Here's a video going over things: