Weapon Attachments Configuration for UFPS/FPC

I'm not sure how to put this, but as of this afternoon, my Development PC is dead in the water. My APC UPS failed during a power outage in the middle of the night, and the PC didn't go down cleanly. When I tried to bring it up, it was seeing one of my HDD's in the BIOS, so I swapped out both the SATA cable and the power supply connectors, and it now sees it, but Windows 10 has been booting now for over 65+ minutes, and am not sure what's going on as it's not showing up on the network. I'm going to let it continue to do what it needs to, for the rest of the day. I do have the development backed up, both locally, and in my SVN Repository. Worst case scenario, I have to replace an HDD.

I don't know how long I'll be down for. I'll be taking the system apart tonight, and testing the drives as well as the board and the power supply, and hopefully that will all be said and done.

Rob
 
I was finally able to get the system up and running, however, the drive is dead in the water. I have to take a step back, and come up with a way of buying a new hard drive, and then getting it here as quickly as possible. I doin't have any spare drives, at the moment.

I'll keep you all posted.
 
As of this morning, I've been able to recover ab out 99.9% of the development done on this, and am having to use an external drive, temporarily, for development. I'm cleaning up the excess files, between the backups and the repository versions as I had about 15% of the files checked out, but not committed as I was still testing. I hope to be back up to 100% by the end of the day. I have to order a new drive, and can hopefully get that here fairly quickly.

:)

Rob
 
New Hard Drive and Additional Memory ordered. Everything will be here tomorrow! I've also recovered/rewritten what was lost (Stayed up most of the night), and am back on track!!!

:cool:
 
I need to let everyone know what's going on, development wise. I'm still working on integrating this with UFPS, FPS as well as the Ultimate Character Controller which included Third-Person now. I've had some hardware problems in the past few months, as well as some medical conditions.

I now have Bell's Palsy, on my left side. For those of you not familiar with the condition, it's partial face paralsys, and I'm experiencing wuite a lot of pain behind and below my left ear. This is making it difficult for me to focus, as I have to struggle to keep my left eye open. Unfortunately, this is also the second time in my life I've had this condition, the first time was back in January of 2018, and it lasted about 11 months. I'm one of the lucky few, I guess, as It can re-occur, although very highly unlikely, it can happen within 2 years of the first incident.

I'm continuing to work through this, keeping up with what I can, and Using a lot of eye drops.

I know I'm behind, but have made quite a few improvements on the controllers.

I had to go back, and re-work some of the integrations due to hard drive loss. When I did finally recover/re-write all of the missing code, I found that there were sever drops in framerates, when applying weapon animations. This was on my end, and I'm still fixing it.

Just wanted to let everyone know what's going on, and why there haven't been any updated videos, as of late. I'm keeping Justin in the loop.

Rob
 
I'm happy to report that all is back on track, and it was a very productive week. I'm going to take this weekend off, relax, and restart all integration testing, and hope to be posting more videos/content updates by the end of next week!!

As for the bell's palsey, my doctor started me on Anti-virals, and I'm actually happy to report that they're working, the pain is pretty much gone, and I've actually regained some (emphasis on some) facial muscle movement!

Have a great weekend everybody!!
 
So, this is a difficult email to write, but don't worry its not a project cancellation email. Its a reason why the project is late and very far behind, and I'll explain below.

When I first started this project, it was originally intended for only UFPS, and that's how development began. At some point along the way, I decided it would be better to re-architect the configuration system so that it could be utilized by other FPS Systems on the Unity Asset Store, and this where things went off of the rails.

By doping so, it was a big mistake on my part. What ended up being a simple Weapon Attachment System for UFPS, blew up to where it was almost being written as a sole FPS system because filler modules had to be writtend for testing purposes, and this is where it became really complicated.

I made a rookie software engineering mistake to occur, and that was Self-Inflicted Scope Creep.

When working on development teams, there are individuals tasked with making sure that things like this don't occur, that act as a go-between for DEV, QA, PROD Administrators, while keeping in communications with project sponsors, business analysts, etc..

Instead of realizing and admitting this to myself, I continued to try to make it work, and not take a step back, and just go back to the basics.

That's what this email is for. I'm going back to just redesigning the architecture/integration initially for UFPS first, then the First Person Controller, and finishing with the Third Person Controller.

The reason for this is order, is because of my experience level with each of the individual systems. The majority of development for UFPS will be used for FPC/TPC. and where those two systems are, only the Melee Attachments will be available to FPC and TPC. My least amount of experience is with the Third Person Controller, but Opsive was gracious enough to provide me with access to this for development purposes.

The majority of the code base is already written, it's just simplifying what is required and not trying to re-invent the wheel.

If anyone has direct questions, please don't hesitate to contact me directly via messages here. I still have yet to work on my web-site, which will be next so that updates and documentation will be freely available, as well as offline in the package.

Here's to getting back to basics, and my apologies again, as I know you have all been extremely patient with me!

Rob
 
Ok, so after working day and night over the last few days, I have brought the project back to where it should be. I am now implementing the logic for UCC's Ultimate First Person Shooter, Ultimate Third Person Shooter, First Person Controller and Third Person Controller.

In the next week or so, I'm hoping to have the first version over to Opsive for their review/recommendations/etc...

Sorry if I had everyone worried for a while!
 
I just wanted to post an update.

Development work is about 85% complete for the alpha testing. I'm currently working on Configuration processes and screens, that will allow the developers to create attachments from base GameObjects, as well as for configuring the UCC components for integration with the Weapon Attachments System. No changes to any promised features, but am definitely looking to add more, once the Alpha/Beta testing phases are complete.

I should have an updated video posted on YouTube by Friday, with the updated configuration and creation screens. I hope to have the first video of the first initial integration with UCC within the following 1 to 2 weeks after that.

I'll keep this forum thread up to date, and once the Asset is launched on the Asset Store, I'll move ll content over to either my web-site, or over to Unity Forum Threads.

I've also began coding the configuration system for developers to create Game Level Weapons and Attachments in the editor, as well as to allow Players to save Attachment Selections per weapon, as well as any additional customization's, such as preserving Attachment Activation in between rounds/game play, as well as any customization to the Sight Reticle Controller for Reticle Brightness, Positioning, Type and Color!

The unity package file will still include example attachments, though they're not really considered quality enough for Production! There are some really quality weapon attachments already available on the Asset Store!

Rob
 
So, I wanted to share with you how the system is designed to work, currently. After importing the package, there will be guided steps, but this is just a subtle breakdown.

All control is managed by a Game Configuration Data File (Scriptable Object). It basically contains the links to 3 other Scriptable Object files for Serializing all Game and User Settings. These consist of the following:

Game Attachment Configuration - All Attachment Settings, icons, functionality
Game Weapon Configuration - All Weapons defined to work within the system
User Weapon Configuration - User Attachment settings on a per weapon basis.

The Game Attachment Configuration is linked to an Item Inventory (1 to 1). The Game Weapon Configuration is linked to the Game Attachment Configuration and it's linked ItemInventory. The Game Attachment Configuration is built by scanning your current project for all ItemPickup prefabs in the Project Hierarchy, and creates a unique weapon refernence for each uniquie set of Item Definition Amounts that have a length of 2, and are members of the specifgied Item Inventory in the Game Attachment Configuration. It's assumed that the Weapon Item Definition Amount is 1, and the other Ammunition Item Definition Amount is greater than 1. Once a Weapon Item Pickup Prefab is located, the system will create a new Prefab based on the contents of the Item Pickup Prefab, removing all Opsive and Collider Components. The ItemPickup prfab is not changed in anyway, and there is no linking between the 2 prefabs, as to not cause issue with your weapons. This will be used for creating a Weapon Structure Mapping, for determining where Attachments should spawn to, based on the configuration in the Game Weapon Configuration. Currently, it's a manual process of dragging the transforms of the Weapon game objects into their designated Weapon Structrure Assignments. This includes objects such as Barrels, Barrel Ends, Clips, Triggers, Upper and Lower Receivers. Any required transforms that are missing or unassigned will be resolved by creating Placeholder Prefabs into the Weapon game object structure of the Configuration Prefab. then you can drag these missing Structrues to proper locations and positions in the Scene view.

Once all this is done, the system will add a Weapon Attachment Rig to the Configuration Prefab, and this is what will get added dynamically at runtime, without breaking any Prefab relationships.

Once this is done, the system is setup to only allow changes to the Game * Configuration Data Files while in the Unity Editor, and not in any form of Build, including Developer Builds. This is due to the Unity Editor scripting and controls put in place to prevent someone from Changing Game Configured Data. I'm creating a runtime environment, just for the Editor, so that you can Assign/Unnasign Attachnments to Weapons. Set them as the Default, whether they're enabled by Default, and this is on a per Weapon Configuration.

The last Scriptable Object is the User Weapon Configuration, and it stores the Users Preferences on an Attachment per Weapon level. This means that they can have a different configuration for an attachment on different weapons, and their settings are stored. This includes whether or not an attachment is selected, or if it was Activated, and preserves these settings in between Game Sessions and Scene Changes.

There's a lot more to it, than this, but it's coming along nicely. I'm still working the UI, and getting screen shots, and have have to link those from my website in the next few days. I've been putting in late nights, just to get the system ready for release. Hopefully, I will have a video of the system working, and how to use it, soon...

Rob
 
I'm conitnuing to work on the Game Weapon and Attachment Configuration Screens. I'm also still trying to get my website updated, but its been so long since I've done web design, that I'm probably going to install DotNetNuke or WordPress and be done with it.

I have updated screen shots, but haven't had a chance to update my site yet as the work on the configuration screens is taking more time than expected.

I'm going to post a couple here, for now, and then resume work on my site hopefully sometime in the next day or so.

Assault rifle Configuration Screen
WeaponConfiguration_AssaultRifle.png

Pistol Configuration Screen

WeaponConfiguration_Pistol.png

Here is a screenshot of the current Project Hierarchy


WeaponAttachmentsSystemForUCC.png

I really do hope to have an updated usage video within a couple of days, and will post it to YouTube, and post a link here as well.

Rob
 
I Am currently down, physically. My wife and I are both fully vaccinated, and still wear masks out in public

We both started showing early flu like symptoms on Wed ednY night (her) and Thursday evening (me). We were called Friday evening and notified by her workplace that 3 Temps all tested positive for covid-19.

We're not sure of their vaccination status, as they won't tell us.

We're both scheduled for a test on Monday as forenoon, but as fsr as symptoms go, we have everything but the chill blades on our fingers. And neither of us have lost taste or smell.

I'll post back on Tuesday. Right now it feels like a bad case of the flu, with bronchitis.

Rob
 
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So, last night was the worst of the last few nights. I generally have a normal temperature of around 96.8 - 97.5, generally ion the cooler side of things. When I'd get an infection, i generally never would gt feverish. My wife's temp hit about 100.2, and stayed there pretty constantly. When she took my temperature, it was 102.7, and I couldn't believe that. Took a low dose aspirin, and tried to sleep. she checked my temp a half hour later, it was 103.6. Took another low dose aspirin, tried to get back to sleep. around 6:30 last night, my fever peaked at 104.6. I was close to going to the ER. Took another low dose aspirin, drank an entire32 oz bottle of powerade zero, and a third of a bottle of nyquil and a third of a bottle of dayquil. Crawled into bed, under the covers, and woke up around 10:30, and my fever had broken, and it's down to just slight sore throat, cough, and some aches and pains.

We're both fully vaccinated, and haven't gotten our third booster shot yet.

Please, get vaccinated, where your mask, keep your distances, stay safe and healthy, and look out for one another.

This is the scariest thing I've ever gone through, and I hope none of you have to experience it.

Please, stay safe and healthy. I'm looking forward to getting back to working on getting this finally released. Right now, it's just down o the UI, and getting my site/site documentation up and running.

Rob
 
We're on our 8th day of dealing with Covid-19, and one day you'll feel good, and the next, not so much. We think we're on the very end of the virus, luckily, no hospitalization. The last count from my wife's office was 15 out with Covid. Also, the Dept of health did confirm that they are seeing an increased spike in Fully Vaccinated with Infection, but the hospitalization rate is much much lower for those vaccinated, than those not vaccinated.

I have been working on getting my site up and running, and hope to have it migrated over to production, and then the videos and photos posted there, shortly.

Rob
 
So, things haven't progressed as well as they should be, virus wise. I find out tomorrow morning, whether I'll need to be admitted to Cleveland Clinic in order to finish up recovering from the the virus.
 
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