New ability & VFX woes

For this sprint I was able to mostly stick to my own thing, that being the new ability system, and the development of the first new ability, smoke form.  I had a head start from last month on the new ability system, so I was able to get that finished relatively quickly this week without too many problems.  With the extra time I had from getting that done earlier than expected, I was able to get started on the smoke form ability, which I was previously saving for the next sprint.

Going into the smoke form ability, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the ability to look like and how it would function. A dash forwards that retained some control, and let you slip through small spaces. There would be smoke particle effects on the screen, as well as some kind of screen shader effect to sell the idea of turning into a cloud of demonic smoke.  Getting the actually functionality for it was pretty easy, though I had some initial issues with the player getting stuck, which I expected, due to the ability modifying your hitbox. I looked into the best way to fix this and after messing around with a few things, decided to simply re-purpose Unreal's  crouch function that's built into the character and has safeguards against getting stuck when shrinking and growing a characters hitbox.  This ended up working great, and I tried to implement it in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with an actual crouch function for the character if we decide to implement one later.

After that I worked on the effects for the ability, which ended up being quite a headache. The effect is composed of two main pieces,  groups of particle emitters around the edges of the camera to give the impression of your arms turning to smoke, and a post processing volume that is turned on to provide a dark and spooky effect to the screen.  Additionally, the a ability hides your arms for its duration.

So, Basically first i worked on the post processing volume, which for the longest time I thought wasn't working because i was hiding the ENTIRE character, so when i was trying to toggle the post processing effect on, i was also hiding it from view. This led to me creating a whole string of unnecessary dependencies between the player and what was supposed to be my nice self contained visual effect for the ability before i finally figured it out and made it to just hid the arms. Then when i went to work on the particle effects, I ran into a bunch of issues on how specifically to hide them and structure them, and similarly ended up implementing them in a horrible way. In spite of the how i had designed the ability system to be able to self contain each abilities VFX, I ended up creating the particle effects on the player and hiding/showing them via the ability. What i determined much later after someone else noticed when playing, was that hiding the arms view model, wasn't hiding the individual view models for the abilities, so i didn't need to set it up the way that I did. I was basically operating still on the assumption that the entire character was getting hidden, and yeah it just ended up being a complete mess. At some point I hope to go back and clean things up.

Here's a quick video getting a bit more into the specifics and covering some extra stuff.