3D Computer Game Engines - Changelog 2.0, CTF-Mill_v06/v07

To begin the changes which needed to be made for this changelog, I adopted a couple of Unreal meshes and copied them out into a folder of pieces for this level, this included a standard button and the lava material which had been copied out in previous builds.

Initially, unaware of the "Pain Causing Volume" accessible through the menus in the Unreal Tournament Editor, I began blueprinting a 'damage-over-time' type piece, with the idea being that as long as the player stays within the volume (placed directly on top of the molten steel following tipping) they would receive a pre-determined amount of damage per second.

As I was having some troubles with this, in comparison to the creation of blueprints in the base Unreal Engine 4, I consulted with a peer who brought to my attention the pain causing volumes, this turned out to be exactly what I needed and was put in place immediately.

For basic functionality purposes, the creation of my environmental hazard required me to make static meshes out of a few of the BSP's I had used for placeholders, once converted I began the process.

I place the switch blueprint, the environmental hazard itself and the pain volume underneath the floor for ease of use and ease of transition.
I created a matinee for each respective piece of the environmental hazard, laying out and animating them as necessary, with the steel containers being placed in one of the side corridors branching centrally from the playable area.

As can be seen below, the matinee for the button itself is triggered after a 210 second delay from the event begin play, this is the half way point of the first half in a Capture The Flag game.

When approaching the button, the user will see a "Press E" prompt and when E is pressed, Unreal will make a call to the "Matinee Steel Container" event.
Again seen below, this event subsequently plays five matinees, one for each steel container, one for the environmental hazard itself and one for the pain causing volume. At the same time is reverses the matinee for the switch, sinking it back into the ground and removing it from play so as to avoid occurrences of eventual players spamming the environmental hazard.

This could possibly have been built within blueprints as I initially intended, but for quick functionality purposes, this works as my original idea was intended and could possibly be cheaper on CPU usage.

Going forward, I will be putting forward another set of questions for my peers to accompany the new build, and will be once again making any tweaks with the feedback in mind, these could be regarding timing of the access to the environmental hazard, the length of the animation itself, the damage dealth by the pain volume and more. Any feedback will be added and built upon.

Going further forward I will be tweaking this map for either the DM or TDM game modes, I feel TDM may be a more likely alternate path based on the sizing of the map, but will experiment none the less, this will likely demand a tweak to the environmental hazard timing, as I think DM and TDM respectively have different time limits assigned to the 7 minutes a half of CTF.