Monday, October 2nd
I had and interview with Tension, and then spent much of the day wrestling with Unreal Engine, which was throwing a massive tantrum. I then started prototyping world interactables using Unreal interfaces.
Tuesday, October 3rd
I made a system which causes the player to "target" the nearest Interactable Object, which will be the base for creating interaction logic. Only the currently targeted interactable can be interacted with.
Wednesday, October 4th
I implemented interaction widgets and outlines for the Interactables, so the player can clearly see when they are interacting with something. I also started working on multiplayer-compatible interaction logic.
Thursday, October 5th
I finished the first working iteration of the interaction system. I temporarily used a parent class which holds all the logic for interactions (because I was more comfortable with it and wanted to test my idea). Using this method, all interactables would need to inherit from this parent class, which is not ideal since some classes need to have other parents. Thus, I started reworking the system to be ActorComponent based instead.
Friday, October 6th
I successfully converted the system to be ActorComponent based, and then *also* made a parent class which contains
some base functionality. This way, my fellow designers can simply make their actors inherit from the InteractableParent
and the important code is pre-written for them. This should make it easier to implement interactions quickly.
Additionally, I introduced a Component that I call a Receiver. It gets notified whenever its connected interactbles
(easily selected via drag-and-drop from the viewport) are interacted with. By putting this Receiver on something like a
door and selecting a couple of button interactables as required to open it,
we very quickly have a customizable locking door system!
