Problem:

For Shutdown, one of my tasks this week was to create a grapple node that the player could grapple onto and retract to pull themselves along the floor. I intended to use this anchor in our vent section in level 3. In the vents there would be fan that is pulling the player and to avoid getting pulled into the fan they would have to grapple onto node, retract and pull themselves to safety. Fortunately, fellow developer Vrij Patel made his grapple system and the nodes easily accessibly and adaptable. I just needed to figure out how to apply the force properly to the player. 

Solution:

To do this, My initial idea was to use unreals tick function and a boolean that determined whether the player was actively retracting or not. I would take the grapple nodes location and subtract the players location to get the the direction and distance to the node. After getting this, I would add a float variable to it and then apply the force to the player. 

This however did not quite work as I wanted and the player would fly in the initial direction they connected the node only and it did not seem to take into consideration where the player was looking. Upon looking back at the blueprint I realized the issue was that I was adding the vector and the node attraction together. This led to the force not being applied correctly to the player as Addition does not scale while multiplication does. After switching the math to be multiplication, the retraction felt a lot closer to my initial vision but was not quite right. The player felt like they were floating when retracting and it was not as smooth as intended. To fix this, I decided to ignore the Z axis and take the pin out from the normalize node.

- Christian Ortiz, VECCA Dev