Making it in Unreal: CrossVector X and the challenge of building rails in space

There’s a scene in the new moon landing movie, First Man, in which Ryan Gosling’s Neil Armstrong climbs into a g-force simulator to brave the effects. The metal bars around him spin every which way, like playground equipment in a hurricane, and he falls unconscious within seconds. The comparison might be hyperbolous, but it’s nonetheless what we’re reminded of when lead technical designer Harry Ketteringham describes the ordeal of designing a camera to suit CrossVector X - an on-rails space game that sees you skimming the surface of alien planets in a fighter ship. “It’s quite tricky,” he tells us, “because the ship is following the spline, you’ve got the camera following behind that spline, and then you’ve got the player aiming, the ship rotating, and the spline camera rotating around. You have all these angles and rotations trying to work together and it feels quite nice at the moment, but it’s not perfect.” It’s clearly not not working, since we finish the enjoyable EGX build of the game without pulling a Gosling. But there’s plenty of challenge involved in building something like CrossVector X, where control is a constant negotiation between the game and its player.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2AmoCwh