3/26/19
Spring break is to blame for my lack of blogging, but I return with good news. The week before spring break, we covered change of basis in my Linear Algebra class. After speaking with my professors, I learned how to do change of coordinates and some quick googling showed me how to rotate points using matrices. Within the Unreal Engine itself, rather than building the necessary matrices to do this conversion, I just wrote my own function which actively does the same thing. It does so as a stream of calculations rather than FMatrix functions. I am happy to see that the mower is properly moving about. Next on the list for mower mechanics include force, mower animations, and collision parameters. I am currently using SetActorLocation which is a near absolute position. I have a problem with clipping and phasing through objects such as walls since the object doesn’t “sweep” to its position. I am aware that “sweep” is an option in Unreal, but I don’t know that it can be done with SetActorLocation. I will look further into this implementation, but my current plan to solve the issue is to use line traces off my mower and see if an object is in its way. Either way, I don’t feel that this will be an issue for long. I additionally plan to several tweaks to the mower such as an update to my camera mechanics and balancing proper mower speeds.
Despite having plans for all the mower updates, outside of tweaks and collision, I plan to put the rest of the mower physics on the shelf for now. Aside from collisions, the mower currently moves in accordance with a proper mowing model and I would like to put time towards other portions of the project. For example, I would really like to begin working on an A.I obstacle that moves around. With the obstacles in mind, I want to start adding win/loss/exit conditions into the game. As such, I need to start working on various HUD’s with things such as the rules/objectives/stats and so on. Although I foresee this being a fairly easy task, I feel that it will be a time consuming task since it will require design.
At the top of my agenda is updating the gallery. I noticed that my “Angle Congruence” image never posted. I will get that updated correctly and I also intend to add several more pictures to the gallery. I likely will get to the mass gallery update tomorrow since its advisement day and I will have a good amount of time to work on getting images. Since its taken this long to get the “Angle Congruence” image, I will probably put in a small amount of additional effort to make the drawing in GeoGebra.
Time to start cutting the grass.
