Day 91: Sometimes The Gravity Wells Come Back... Again

I'd never thought that a mechanic I implemented in a previous project would make a reappearance, but here it is. After working with the tracking crystal (which, by way of storing all nodes in the scene and detecting which one is closest to shine it with a specific color (double-parentheses note: will be optimized by not checking every single frame)), I also had to make a quick fix on the nodes. Seeing as nodes will not always be boxes, I had to update the entire parent object of the node to a more generic sphere, instead of a box one can jump on. This may also lead to work in the future that concerns where the node rotates once detached.

As for the gravity well, I had actually implemented a similar concept where an object would disable gravity on an object and instead apply force toward a specific point. It's thankfully quite simple, but will vary based on the object. A character movement component is quite straightforward, but anything else will either have a pawn movement component or a specific primitive component that has physics enabled. We'll keep it to the mesh for now.

As for one last thing, I also applied a custom time dilation effect for later, so that the entire world slows down (projectiles included) until sped up, allowing such things as a circle of projectiles to be drawn around a target. The way that time dilation works for objects in Unreal Engine 4 is that a global time dilation is multiplied by an actor-specific time dilation. That said, if the whole world were to slow down except for the character, the character would have to vary dilation to be higher than 1.0.

Next up? Not sure. Design needs a bit more work before I can continue further.