Hey Paragon, It's Me Again: Implementation of Animations for Dwarf Ranged Units

 Hey Paragon, It's Me Again: Implementation of Animations for Dwarf Ranged Units

Author: Sean Jamelarin
Posted on 9/8/23

    The problem:
    During this week of development, I needed to breathe life into the dwarf ranged unit with animations and assets. Without this step, players will be confused to if the character is functional, and unable to deduce the unit's capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. 

    The Solution:
    I decided to use assets from Paragon's Twinblast to animate the dwarf units. That allows me to bypass the work of finding and ascertaining whether assets will work correctly on the Unreal platform and other minutiae needed to import and retarget assets. This leaves me with an additional problem, however: Twinblast is character who uses dual-wielding pistols as his go-to weapon - I needed to find a gun asset that would make at least some sense in a high-fantasy world. Enter the Steampunk Revolver asset, as shown here below:

Afterwards, I added a new item socket into the skeletal mesh the dwarf ranged unit, created a new animation blueprint stemming off of the Third Person Anim Instance C++ class created last week, and created a new actor using the steampunk revolver as the static mesh. Finally, I modified the dwarf ranged unit with all the new functionality.

Here's a brief overview of work done:
    1. Acquire Twinblast's game assets, download in a seperate project, retarget and import animations to         Realm Rumble, then retarget again for the dwarf unit skeleton.
    2. Find and import steampunk revolver assets into Realm Rumble
    3. Create C++ class and actor blueprint for steampunk revolver
    4. Create animation blueprint and add socket in dwarf skeletal mesh's right hand
    5. Go into dwarf ranged unit's C++ class and perform the codebase changes to accommodate

TODO:
   There's something wrong with how the ranged unit inflicts damage - that will be a major thing to finish up.

Buildings also don't have the ability to take damage from enemy attacks yet, so that's another thing to worry about. 

I updated the tooltip widget for buttons in the Architect's UI, but I have yet to figure out a way to show the stats of the unit the button will spawn.