Taking a break from Ai, I wanted to make some visual and audio additions to the game so that further play testing could be done in environment closer to how the final game will look and sound.
Volumetric Fog
The first thing I wanted to work on was the overall tone the weather was setting in the game, I would do this by making use of volumetric fog in Unreal Engine. Below you can see the current state of the games lighting and sky box which resembles something close to cloudy summers day using Unreal Engine's base sky box.
Below you can see how me and the group decided how we wanted the game's weather to look with a dense mist covering the game map, we wanted this to add to the overall tone of mystery to the games world with the environment being a low visibility area so they player would question what is in the distance. The reference also is from Iceland and is typical weather that you can typically see in Icelandic landscape reference.
Below you can see the intial pass using Volumetric fog with the same intial sky box still on the game map which more gives the ilusion of fog in the distance out to sea, though I want the player to feel as they are in deep fog.
Below you can see the final result in which Ive also editied the base skybox. To get this effect of an impression of a sky box past the mist, I had to make the skybox subsurface scattering colour completely black with the cloud colour being set to the brightest white colour. Without the fog the sky looks awful but with the volumetric fog added to the scene the overall look of the scene starts to take place.
Rain Downpour Affect
When looking into getting rain implemented into the game, I first looked into how Unreal Engine handles particle effects through a system called Agari. The system allows you to add a base particle effect to the scene and with the use of nodes on unreal's blueprint screens edit these to get the result you want.
The process to achieve a rain effect involved editing areas of the node that effect the overall spawn amount of the particles, the density of which they are close to each other and the initial spawn location of the particle.
There was also a second node created to emulate when a splash particle would have to be shown when the rain particle would collide with an object in the game world.
Though when the particle system was scaled up to the scene, the game ran awfully and for reference this is the game running with Ryzen 5 and 3060 Ti graphics card so its just not physiable to use this method in this way to have rain in the game.
In Game Audio
The last thing I wanted to look to add to the game to see how it could work down the line was audio. My plan was to set up two audio types, a local hearing audio type and a global audio type. The global audio type would be a light wind to add to the stormy atmouspher in the game, the local would be attached to the fire affects in the enemy demo scene as that will be recreated in the final game map, so fire assets will be needed.
Global audio you can simply achieve by dragging an audio flle on to the game map which will play a consistent sound whenever that game map is in play. For the fire audio I just created a simple cue which can be done by right clicking audio files in Unreal. This means that audio file becomes editibale in the blueprint editor which could possibly used to blend two audio tracks, though it also allows you to edit the object in the viewport which in turn means you can change the radius of the audio. There is two editable radius to it, one is the central radius which is where the player hears the audio at full volume and the outer is where the audio track slowly fades into the player's audio.
Below you can see a demo of all these features combined with audio all in place.