Dev Log 3

 This week I began with changing the idle animation to a fallen one instead of a kneeling one as this works and look much better with the ragdoll effect. I also changed the intensity of the ragdoll as from when I changed my character it now does not look natural. During changing the intensity I struggled as I could not remember which value you had to edit in order to change this. This did take me a while and I ended up trying to change all the values however once I took a step back and looked through the code and the help of the tutorial I had used I was able to find which value you needed to change. This made me a lot more aware that when I am coding it is important to label what you are doing as this will make things easier to find and make the process quicker.

After these changes I implemented a pickup mechanic so that the character could pick up certain objects. For this I created a new actor blueprint which contained a static mesh so I will be able to change this depending on the object needed. I then went into my character blueprint where I decided that the key you need to press in order to grab would be the 'E' key. I then used a sphere trace for objects node which will be used to see if there is an object you are allowed to pick up within the radius set. Another important thing I needed to make was a new Boolean variable which would check if you are carrying an object you wont be able to pick another one up.

By the end of the day I had this working however it is not how I first intended this to work. When you have an object selected the first problem is that you can not let it go and the second one is that it is just being dragged along the floor behind the character. Having this will not work for the game as the character will need to pick up and drop different objects to complete the levels and also need to be places in certain places. In next week I will look on how to make the movement of the objects controlled and how to drop/place the objects when the player is done with them. When coding the pick up mechanic I made sure that I was commenting the code and understanding what each section was doing this will then help me in the following week when I need to look through and figure out why my mechanic isn't working the way I intended.