v0.1.1 DevLog - JR

"Problems with Enemy Spawning"

Author: Jeremiah Rangel

Posted on 07/12/24

THE PROBLEM

After creating and setting up our new arena, the "Temple Arena", I came across errors that I hadn't seen before when trying to test enemy spawners. Regardless of where I put the spawner, and no matter how big or how small I made the spawner's radius, there would be times where certain enemies would get flagged as "Not Valid", resulting in them getting destroyed immediately. This bricked player progression as the enemy got removed from the "Enemy Spawning" queue, but, since we would be short enemies, the player would get stuck in the wave they are currently in, effectively bricking their progress. These errors never showed up when doing the Colosseum level, so I attempted to see if the thin floor of the Temple mesh was the issue. At first, it appeared it was as I put a thicker floor underneath the main arena, but, as testing went on, the errors would show up again.

 THE SOLUTION

The solution was effectively doing more checks within our spawning logic to ensure that if an enemy is unable to spawn, do not do anything and leave them in the queue to try again. I put a "Is Valid?" check after our "SpawnActor" node in the Blueprint which would only execute our already-existing nodes if spawning was successful. In addition, I also ensured that we checked the location itself that was being generated in case that ended up being an issue as well. I also changed our radius for checking spawn locations to now accurately grab the true radius of the spawner it is trying to call upon, by grabbing both the radius value of the spawner itself and multiplying it by the average scale of the spawner in order to more accurately spawn an enemy in its visible radius. I learned that it is always best to look through all code created, even if it isn't created by you, so that you can truly understand what you are working with and, if it presents itself, get rid of bugs or errors that may have been missed when the author first created said code.