Building an Enemy

• These notes start at 2:00 Creating an Enemy Base.
• And end at 2:45
• He states that he is going to build a hierarchy.
  • This is why you took 330.
  • Do this.
• Note he starts with an existing class as his base class!
  • And the first thing he does is go into a design.
  • Remember, this is the most generic of the enemies
    • So it shouldn't contain any specializations
    • Think this through thoroughly as you design your game.
    • "What should/must all enemies be able to do?"
    • The specialize with child classes after that.
  • Note he discusses that movement might not be a property of an enemy.
• He decides that all enemies need
  • DefaultHealth, Health.
    • He will probably do this later, but I decided to expose these to the outside world.
      • 
      • Then add an BP_EnemyBase to the world.
      • And I can change the health on a per_enemy basis.
      • 
    • He builds methods for health.
    • He builds a pure virtual function!
      • But I don't think you have the ability to prohibit creating an instance of this abstract class however.
  • That is all he adds at this point.
  • Remember, the good part of this system is that you can add more to the base class later if you find yourself reproducing functionality.
• He then goes on to build a bat subclass.
  • Shows calling the base constructor!
  • And how to provide a member function to override base behavior.
  • Finally five minuets of easy!
• Clear up to bat movement.
  • I didn't see how he was testing movement.
    • And I wanted better control anyway, so I added a keypress.
    • I am fairly sure that the only thing that takes keypresses by default is the player.
    • So I added
      • A change direction member function to the bat.

        • BatT::ChangeDirection{
              MoveRight = not MoveRight
              SetSprintDirection(moveRight);
          } 

        • 
      • And a function in my player character debug events to switch the direction of all bats on the screen.
      • 
      • Finally, I added three more bats. And moved my player start so I could see everything from the start
      • 
• He starts working on bat navigation.
  • A surface normal is a vector pointing straight out (perpendicular) to a surface
  • See Hit Results in the unreal documentation.
  • This essentially points from the impact location back to the thing hitting.
  • I think the normal part comes in as this vector is normalized
• His bat collision left me confused about the checking the hit normal vector.
• I will work it out later when we figure out what he is doing with all of his collisions.