Trophies in the water...

While my eventual idea for a famous five game involves only one, very small, miniscule in fact, use of a pickup, its important to utilise the time, and tasks, given to you to learn all there is to learn that could be relevant.



and so, not only am i making pickups, i also made a giant cube of water floating in the sky...

the giant cube of water is simple enough, its just an enormous floating water volume (and because unreal geometry and volume systems are not affected even a tiny little bit by gravity, it won't fall on our heads) after placement of that we come to having six fluid surface info's, each one dominating the side of the cube.

why do you ask? because i wanted to experiment with timings for drowning, how a character can be affected within water without dying, and the effects of fog in water.

now, pickups by themselves are simple. and therefore boring. what i wanted to do was instead take the idea of "hey you, go collect this stuff for me and i'll give you something of equal value etc" and put a spin on it. in many rpg games there are "collect" missions (go get blah me give you X) but they always seem to assume you can go and grab all of whatever it is your grabbing and keep it stored safely on your person. Instead i want my character to have to be given a bag, or some other item, which will then allow them to carry the collectibles.

the solution to this turned out to be incredibly simple, but it is a testament to how confusing UScript is that such a simple solution can evade someone for so long.

i started with an existing experimental class (to save a bit of time, and i wasn't using the original anyway) originally this pickup would allow the character to activate a lift. (or it was supposed to anyway). now however the crystal would serve as the players bag, so removing the unneccesary code i put in a simple bool variable, so that when the pickup was picked up the bool would be set to true.

Originally i had tried a convoluted route to getting this bool to allow you to pick up my simple pickup, trying to get through my examplepawn class, however a much simpler solution presented itself (after a bit of pushing and shoving from my lecturer John), a straight line. so simple, so elegant, but i hadn't thaught it would work that way.

unreal foiled me again.