I’m in the middle of creating a tutorial on how to use Scaleform GFx to create a simple health bar HUD. I will upload it here (YouTube video I think) as soon as I can.
EDIT: This is now online on one of the pages linked to above.
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Looks like the May release of UDK replaces the UI Scenes with Scaleform (video).
I guess I’m going to have to re-do the HUD then 😦
Today was the turn of the health meter.
“His physical condition is in the bottom-left, in the form of a diagram of his body with each hit area’s HP superimposed as a percentage. Each hit area is coloured green initially, turning gradually red as more HP are lost. When a hit area is at zero HP, the hit area turns black.”
The development was as follows:
- I took a crappy photo of myself on a plain(ish) background.
- Photoshopped the photo onto bluescreeen.
- Drew around outline with a basic shape
- Filled in shape with black outline and white insides.
- Split shape into component parts (so they could be modified individually)
After this, I imported the textures into the game and mapped them to the HUD. I also created a function to modify their color based on the amount of health of each area (fixed at the moment). the HP value given in the picture below is for the whole body.
So that’s that – barring the percentage text (which I’ll probably add tomorrow).
I might get around to using a better image at some point in the future, but for now, this serves its purpose
Ok, so after creating a new Pawn, PlayerController, GameType, Input and basic level. I overwrote some basic functions that I wanted to remove (Double Jump, Dodge etc.) that were present in the UT versions of the above.
I then moved on to the HUD.
This first step was the compass. This was very easy, just create a material and draw it onto the HUD with a rotation value of the Player’s rotation (with pitch and roll set to 0) so that ‘North’ became ‘Yaw=0’
Next was a visibility meter. This proved to be harder and currently only has basic functionality (set the base visibility value from some debug key commands and mod it if crouching). The harder bit is going to be to get it to respond to light levels.
A screenshot of the HUD so far (demo’d in the basic level) is shown below.
Key to Screenshot:
1) Texture on wall to indicate ‘North’ Wall
2) HUD Compass
3) Basic visibility meter (currently ‘invisible’). Red blocks turn green as visibility increases.
Edit:
Just realised that the Compass is pointing in the wrong direction (East = West) so changed it so the compass rotation’s Yaw = 360 – player Yaw.
Oops!
This is the first post on the blog for the development of ‘No Experience Necessary’.
I first got the idea for the game after looking through the website of Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Crowshaw and seeing a script for a game idea (link). This was after I had been fiddling about with the editor for UT3 for a while, and had just stumbled upon the UDK which has been released ‘free’ this year. After this, I started thinking “Hey, that looks like a really neat game, I could do something with that!”
And so the idea was born.
I will be using this blog to document the progress through the development, hopefully giving you an insight into my mind.
And you never know, maybe I will actually finish the game and get a few people to pay to play it!
No Experience Necessary 