procedural cover system

This shows the work done on a procedurally based cover system. Many games and shooters today employ cover systems allowing you to fire from behind walls. Most developers implement cover systems in mapper-placed entities and map-specific node generation.

When working with Unreal, the code for cover nodes was neither exposed nor did we have the resources to implement such procedures. Instead, we chose to implement cover procedurally, meaning that walls were analyzed in real time for player covering.

This resulted in a complex variety of traces both gathering wall normals and edges. Player movement is restricted to perpendicular movement to wall normals. The player can be animated to 'peek' from a corner. Further work was planned to allow vertical peeking.

Challenges had to be overcome in a procedural cover system, because oftentimes accommodating one scenario meant jeopardizing another. A multitude of error-checks had to be made in addition to performance-scaling.

This video demonstrates the cover systems performance on an increasing level of surface detail.

Category:

Gaming

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• covervid
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