Engine Update: Scripting, ReverbVolume & Tracking Window

The first one is the ReverbVolume as seen in other game engines like Unreal Engine 3. The volume is very useful when defining rooms,allowing you to alter sound properties when either inside or outside of the volume. The volume alternation is already working when inside or outside of the volume, ironically the only thing that is not yet in place is the Reverb effect itself. I'll explain ReverbVolumes a little more in-depth later on once I've completed finished it, hopefully including the actual Reverb effect instead of just the volume/pitch modifiers. In the video on the bottom you can see/hear it for yourself.

The white box is the reverb volume, the blue circles are ambient sounds emitters (or actually the radius of the emitter)

Another concept I've been experimenting with is a sort of Tracking Window (or output/clipboard window) It's an additional (and optional) window that you can use to print out useful information. You can choose to print it as a static string. As a sort of clipboard/memory aid to help with Vector positions or pretty much any piece of info you may need to remember in runtime. If it were nothing more than that, it would pretty much be an in-editor notepad...So I added something I like to call "live-tracking" (or real-time tracking, or just tracking...) You can use the tracking feature to keep track of any property an object may have (positions, rotations, scale, volume, pitch, visbility etc.) the window uses a series of Slots that can be filled with one traceable object each. Most of it is already working, I'll have to spend some more time on it to add every little detail. Eventually I'd like to have each slot assessable and allow user input to change any of the properties that is being tracked by the window. You can see a sneak preview of it in the video below.

The tracker window is tracking the positions of 3 objects in the scene.

The last thing I worked on today was a basic scripting/event system. In both "Needle Juice" & "Over Night" the event code got really messy over time, requiring a lot more time to find anything...which is a complete waste of time, especially when you're nearing the end of a project. In order to prevent this from happening again I need to have a solid and clean system to handle events and scripts. So far I redesigned the TriggerVolume class used for any positional triggers and added support for Enter/Leave Volume events. To test the new system I made a (simple) script that opens and closes a door when the player approaches.

All of the described features above are shown in the short video below. Make sure to turn on your sound, because the reverbvolume can only explain itself with sound ;)

The first sound you hear is that of a bar, the second is a bit more difficult to hear, it represents the streets just outside of that same bar. when you move through the door, the indoor sound will fade to a lower volume while the street ambient becomes more noticeable.