Recap

I wanted to finish laying the ground work for the mission scripting/blueprints that will be used to differentiate the tactical mission gameplay.

Results

Everything here went alright. It's going to be an on-going process of exposing functionality to blueprint as it comes up, but I believe the patterns are in place such that that work won't be a big deal. Quite a bit of this was also putting things in place so that I could replace chunks of temporary code (like the enemy spawning that I had) with ways to put that under the control of the mission script.

I was able to add to my initial mission script spawning controls and the ability to check for it's mission victory condition (wiping out all the enemy ships). I should probably look into moving the general failure condition (all player ships eliminated) out of native and into the mission script as well, but I'm having a hard time coming up with a tactical mission scenario were that's not at least one of the failure states.

February Goals

Firstly I need to wire up objective tracking and display. It doesn't really do any good if the mission script can win and lose the mission if the player doesn't actually know what the goals are (since I'd really like something more varied that just "blow up all the bad guys).

Secondly I'd like to work on another mission script to exercise the system a little more and try things a little less combat oriented (though not entirely combat-free). One of the ideas I've had in my head as part of the original design involves the environment. Something like, you enter the map and head towards a planet or space station. You find out that they're threatened by some incoming asteroid that'll destroy whatever it is. Then you have a limited number of turns (based on speed and initial distance) to save them. I think this will also be a good chance to do a few non-combat weapons & actions, like Star Trek tractor beams or something. I'd like to have setups for these missions (especially when they're not directly combat oriented) where are a few possible solutions.

Thirdly I want to mess around more with custom K2 nodes. I've been getting a lot of great mileage out of them (both at home and at work) since I started messing with them. My current vexation is that from Blueprint there is no easy way to iterate the elements of a map or set. There is a For Each loop node for arrays, but for some reason that is an Epic provided macro and not a native K2 node. Weird. For my main use case I wrote my own macro, but it's dumb and only works for a specific key-type, value-type pair. I'd like a node that can just work with maps of any type.

Games I'm Playing

Fate Grand/Order

Legends of Runeterra - Currently in open beta from Riot. rreA few of us from work started playing. I like, I don't think I'd spend any money on it at this point. it