Beta Phase Started

The Alpha stage has been completed and development has moved to the Beta phases. After a week off, I'm excited to dive back into development. This week the group got together and composed a statement of work to outline what needs to be completed and by whom by the end of these next eight weeks.

As we have projected since most of the mechanics has been completed, we have mostly bug-testing to do, new levels to create, and improve the audio and visual assets.

What we initially scrapped back in Alpha has come back to haunt me in the Beta stages. The panning camera functionality was something that we decided against as a group, but now that we have moved deeper into development we have a need for it. Our level designer is creating larger levels that just will not look well with a centered camera set-up.

I quickly got to work on this, but with a new approach. Instead of spawning a new camera through code, I decided to use the camera actor already in place for each of the levels. My main problem was how to identify the dragging touch input on the screen. After a little research on the UDK forums on iOS mobile gestures, I was able to construct a set-up similar to a thread post that I read over that would help me identify the drags and their direction. The link to that tutorial is here: Epic Games Forums: iOS Gesture Tutorial.

After being able to read the drag input, the panning was fairly simple to implement. I had the functional panning camera set up, but there were no limits to it.  Below is the rough testing of the panning camera.

Original camera position 

Panned camera to the left

Panned camera to the right

There were a couple of things that my code needed to know before we actually utilize the panning feature of the camera.

1. Is the level large enough that it needs the panning feature?
2. If yes, then how far can we drag the camera in the X and Y directions?

These are the conditions of my camera having the panning feature. I will need to consult with our level designer to see if we can set this information up through the level itself.