The Mysterious, Unmoving Projectile

Author: Christopher Solomon

 

                This past week I was tasked with creating the Large Water Elemental, one of the enemies the player faces in our game. For the most part, implementing it was quite simple. After all, it has many similarities with the other elementals that we have already implemented within the game. The main feature of the large elemental that sets it apart from the others is its ability to shoot projectiles at players who come near. It was while I was creating the blueprint for this projectile that I came across my problem: the projectile would not move at all!

                When this problem occurred, I was quite confused since I had implemented a projectile movement component in the blueprint and inputted the correct settings. My first thought was that perhaps the homing system that was used was causing problems for whatever reason, but removing it did not improve my situation at all. It took a few minutes of me fiddling with the various components of the projectile for me to find the answer to my problem. Changing the projectile’s root component from the arrow component to the sphere collider caused it to function as intended! This situation definitely taught me to pay closer attention to the hierarchy of the components I use.


Before modifying the hierarchy 

After modifying the hierarchy


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