Assembly was easier

So, It's been while since the previous blog. In the previous project I worked on, there would be tons of new developments and discoveries. This project, its like "how many ways can you rotate a burnt pancake while trying to make it look better?".
In simple terms, all the the attempts I've done to finish my goals have been a long chain of failures without much sight for progress. Here are some of the items I've worked on and how they turned out:

= Moving objects around
- My attempt: tried the teleport function, set actor location, set actor location, modify the object property, and setting the velocity connected to a timer. The object either flipped out into space or did nothing
- What worked: teacher kept changing the actor type and the mover or interactor actors were the only ones which worked.

= Dynamically adding actors to the world
- My attempt: using the actor factor (no clue how it works anymore), having a bunch of static objects outside the world and are randomly brought inside the world with a "random int" value which is connected to a timer (timer didn't move even when being activated)
- What worked: group decides on having 1 actor object which is outside the world and is cloned into the world. Each clone has it's own name and is connected to an array for easy access.....I have no clue how to do this in kismet. C#, Java, even C++....no clue about kismet.

= Make a tree to enable/disable waypoints
- My attempt: use an array to hold location points (1 - 10) and enable/disable different values. Those values would then be called by another object to determine if that object should be on or not.
- What worked: Don't use an array, but have a bunch of bool variables instead which are directly enabled by the trigger.

= Make a list of bool variables which are turned on by a trigger
- My attempt: make a bunch of bool variables and named them corresponding to what they will control. Then attach touch triggers to the world which flip the bools. But I have no way of determining if a bool is on or not. The AND gate won't connect, I don't know how to use the "Get Property", and I don't know what else could be used
- What worked: Switch my chain of thought. This was done by removing what I tried and attempted to start it again another way (see the next goal below)

= Use an int value that is changed by a trigger and then retried by a switch function
- My attempt: Realized that I still don't know how to read a variable's value despite trying all the suspected functions in kismet, so this idea was killed very fast.
- What worked: write a blog which explained my failures....well, it didn't solve the problem, but it at least made me feel better about it.


So, there it is. I have a pile of kismet "code" which does nothing besides looking complicated. I have no clue how I'm supposed to pass this class when all the weekly goals have been "I tried this, but I failed, so I don't actually have anything useful to give for the project".....I can't believe udk is still being pumped out every month with a new beta and people are still rushing towards it like it's the new trend.

A week is too short for progress.

So, I spent the last 3 days trying to work on my part for the warehouse project, to make way-point locations and dynamic objects. And I really hate UDK's visual programming thing.
Majority of my time was dedicated to how to move an object in the world and how to dynamically create an object (from a defined list of objects). Both of them are at about 10% of my expectations of what they should be doing.
I have no clue how to create an object from a list of objects in kismet, I barely remember how things work (last time I touched UDK was Feb 2012), and I still can't understand how to "programatically" change an object's location.....the 8086 Assembly made more sense than this...stuff.

...For me to finish my parts, I'd practically have to mentored on a good 90% of everything which my parts contain. Why can't I just do line coding?

First post

First blog post for my senior project (part a). My download of the project file which the previous group made finally finished....took 4 hours and 20 mins (average speed of 30 kb/s). Which is only slightly slower than it would have taken me to get the file from wednesday (estimated 3 hours).

I'm thinking that I should get a new flash drive which is 3.0 compatible.

Other news, about the updated GDD, I posted my changes in the google group and Duane has started making up the document. I am still unsure if we are going to use the MS Kinect, but the currently planned "mouse only" is still good enough and itself would require a lot of work with re-writing the previous program to be click based.