The very first thing I tried to do was figure out a way to have fog (exponential height fog) outside but not inside, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be?
I tried to implement a system using an invisible trigger box where if the character went close to the window, the fog would generate, and if you stepped away, it would go away, which actually did work; however, the fog would still generate in the loft which was kind of a waste of time for me, although I guess I did learn a lot lol.
The door problem
Since I had collisions done, you could no longer just walk through the walls. I wanted to figure out a way to get the player to go to different rooms in the level. At first, using what I’d learned with the fog system, I tried to implement a similar feature where if you stepped on a trigger box, you could teleport to the next room, and again, this did work! I even figured out how to add a sound effect and a nice fade animation to transition nicely; however, it just felt off.
First of all, I had to set up two points to teleport into and out of the room, so I put them logically right in front of the door on both sides. However, it meant the character couldn’t be imported directly in front of the door as that would automatically trigger the second teleport feature, and I didn’t think it made sense to be teleported to the middle of the room continuity-wise.
I also had to add the coordinates for each destination by hand; the whole system felt really clunky, so I just decided to find a different way.
E to Interact
I decided to try to implement a press “E to interact” interaction system, which was more complex to do, but thankfully there was so much information on how to do it that I had no real issues setting it up. It was quite a lengthy process and if I’m being honest idk if I have the bandwidth to type it all up lol. A really key part of it is this line trace system which is connected to the third-person camera. Which essentially is how UE5 is able to determine where the player is looking. I also had to create an “Interact” script and add “E” to the “master list” of movement controls as part of the process of setting this system up
and now I have a good foundation for interacting with objects for the whole game. I also set it up so the interact button only pops up when you look at an interactable object.
I had slight issues the first time I tried to animate the door, it simply didn’t work but I came across another method which involved creating a pivot point and parenting the door to that point and animating it that way which worked perfectly. I also added a door frame to the wall the doors were on just to make it look a bit better and yeah everything works great.
I made the crosshair really quickly in Photoshop; initially, it was meant to be like a circle, but I think the E was a bit clearer. I might also add a pop-up of text that says, “Press E to interact.”
Please ignore the fact the door technically opens the wrong way if you look at were the handle is placed, for some reason when I changed the pivot point to the other side to make it more technically accurate it messed up the animation speed and I couldn’t figure out why and didn’t want to spend a huge amount of time trying to fix something that was more of an aesthetic issue soooo I decided to leave it alone.
I also did a bit of a clean-up for the lighting trying to make things look a bit prettier (the lens flare might be doing a bit too much but I like it) removing weird light points shadows, etc but this is mainly personal aesthetic stuff I might talk about in another post.
Another slight change I made was to how Eve moves around the room. She was running by default but I felt that didn’t make sense. (Who just casually runs around their home?) so now she walks around the space instead.