Unreal Engine 4: Lifts and moving platforms

Lifts and moving platforms are an essential part in making platformer games, or any game at all. And, it is really important because a game with just static objects would be really boring, so you definitely need moving objects, platforms, etc.

Derivatives Explained (Intro)

A derivative is a function $f'(x)$, that gives the slope of the function $f(x)$. To signify a derivative, an apostrophe is put in front of the function name, for example $tax(x) \rightarrow tax'(x)$

Ionic bonding in molecules

When you look at some molecules you might say “Those atoms are not connected, how are they molecules?”. Because of ionic bonding. In ionic bonding, the atoms are not connected by a pair of electrons like in covalent bonding, they are connected by magnetic forces. One of the atoms are negatively charged, the other is positively charged. It doesn’t have to be single atoms too, they can be two different charged structures as well.

Triple post next week (Happy New Year!)

I have been busy, so I couldn’t post too much. I missed two weeks. For that I will post Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to make up for that. But now I will always allocate time every Wednesday. Also, I will make higher quality posts, some of my posts were just rushed so they aren’t too high quality. That is all for now. Stay tuned for the upcoming triple post!

Also, happy new year! I hope 2016 went well for you, and I wish everyone the best in 2017!

Health, and its importance in productivity

So, I was sick for the past 4-5 days, and my productivity nose-dived like a plane that has equipped a half-core Pentium for a main processor. It’s bad. When you get sick, you never want to do anything other that lazily plump down and enter a cryogenic sleep state. Also, when you finally decide to man up and start working, you can’t concentrate because of the pain, pain, pain that goes on as long as the world keeps spinning.

How covalent bonds form

Covalent bonds are like two encyclopedias sharing information. They both need a piece of information, so they give each other information. Those pieces of information are in both encyclopedias. To get a covalent bond, replace encyclopedias with atoms, and replace pieces of information with electrons.

For a simple example, lets take H2. A hydrogen atom has one valence electron, and for the shell to be filled, it needs one more electron because the first shell (also called the K shell) needs 2 electrons to be filled.  How convenient! If the amount of valence electrons is equal to the amount of electrons needed to fill the shell, we can just make a diatomic molecule. You can visualise two hydrogen nuclei with two electrons in between

In the hydrogen molecule, an electron is with both of the atoms. Just like the encyclopedias, the pieces of information are in both encyclopedias.

Lets give another example: the methane molecule (CH4). This works as so: The four hydrogens are arranged tetrahedrally around the carbon atom, and they all share electrons with the carbon. You can visualise a carbon nucleus with four hydrogen nuclei surrounding the carbon in a tetrahedron, and pairs of electrons between the hydrogens and carbon.

But there is an important rule for covalent bonds to be formed.Both atoms have to be nonmetals! If any of them are metals, they wont form a covalent bond. The reason for this is that metals want to give electrons away, but nonmetals want to take electrons. If one of them was a metal, they would make an ionic bond, which I will  write about in my next post.

Now, try to understand the molecule ammonia (NH3). As an extra, try to understand why the shape isn’t completely flat, but a little curved.

Unreal Engine 4 Graphics: Material Instances

Material instances are fairly simple, but they are really useful. If you use material instances, you won’t have to make ten whole materials just to have a variety of colors to choose from. They use a base material that limits how many nodes, values etc. you have by assigning parameters to the ones that are used, and keeping the other nodes and values constant in the base material, and when an instance is created only the nodes with parameters can be used.

Unreal Engine 4 Blueprinting and Designing: Secondary Fire

Creating blueprints or designing a game mechanic might be a challanging task for a beginner, and maybe won’t even be able to start anywhere.  So as a starting place, I have come up with a fairly simple project, that is making a secondary fire for the First Person Shooter template which UE4 provides us with.

Firstly, let’s clarify what we are trying to make. What I have in mind is a heavier metal version of the normal projectile, that makes a lower pitch sound when fired. So, according to that, the things that we have to do are:

• Create a metallic material for the projectile,
• Modify the projectile to be larger,
• Make the projectile’s initial velocity bigger,
• Create a sound to be played when the projectile is fired, and
• Modify the character blueprint so that it fires the second projectile when a secondary fire key is pressed (right mouse button).