Developer Diary 47 - Upgrade

Fun Fact: One of the blueprints on the right became corrupted after the version update. And I have no idea which one it is, but despite the fact, that I have removed all system relevant blueprints from that list, it apparently still causes my entire BP system to crash.

So I add a chunk of BPs, Open UE 4.13.2, Wait, Check BPs. If there's a crash, I move on to the next chunk, if there's no crash I move on to the next chunk anyway to narrow down the list to a single BP.

Fun, fun, fun.

Developer Diary 46 - Building Building Building

Developer Diary 45 - Multiple Layers - Extending The Maze

After a week of AI, LOD and Gameplay improvements I fell victim to the infamous 37.5 FPS lock. So while I was looking for a solution to minimize the amount of objects and blueprints that are visible to the player while moving through the woods (both meshes and BPs of course have visibility spheres and culling enabled), I eventually had the idea of extending Lakini's Woods vertically: The top layer (seen above) is similar to a graveyard garden and has access to the open sky. The layer underneath is a surreal forest / cave / dungeon system that receives it's barriers from the walls of the top layer extending below. The lowest level is hidden underneath the ocean. The walls don't extend to the bottom, so the player is able to swim underneath the maze to any desired location (but of course he can only get back up if there is a connection to the upper layers).

The main advantage of this system is, that most objects are invisible to the player when he's moving through the middle layer as he can only see the objects and plants in the room section he is in. The top layer requires almost no adornment objects, as it contains the gothic towers of the wall barriers and the guiding lights, that eventually lead the player to the discovery of Lakini's rune, the location of the Dharmapala as well as Jonah's shadows. This new system gives me the ability to greatly reduce the culling distance for both blueprints and objects and therefore it might even get rid of the 37.5 FPS lock for good. Additionally the player has access to the open sky so he can use/transform into Hayagriva and fly through the world, or call Mahakala and cause all layers to be filled with water.

The screenshots above are from work I did last week on impact particle systems. I spent a lot of time on the impact FX from the soldier's rifle shots. They are now able to destroy buildings and objects when Jonah tries to hide behind them.

S.M

Developer Diary 44 Why this Code Changed my Life

Soldiers patrol through the maze. They are as large as buildings and destroy everything in their way. A tree is no obstacle to them, neither is a house, a tower or any kind of structure. But because of their size they are able to travel vast distances in a short amount of time.

The distance is too large for any navigation volume to work properly. So after weeks and months of trying to figure out a way to deal with AI while excluding navigation volumes I finally found the answer:

I set the AI movement in the Behavior tree to "Move Directly To". This way of movement causes an AI to move directly towards a specified goal, but it will also cause the AI to float, or fly through the air if it is following a player character which is currently moving up or down hill. The AI may also get stuck when colliding with obstacles, but since the soldiers are too large to collide with anything this is not a concern.

By implementing a Line Trace By Channel that starts 500cm above the pawn location and extends 5000 cm below the pawn location and ignores the pawn, all other blueprints and objects except the landscape itself, it is possible to get the landscape Z coordinate at the pawn's location. This Z value can now be used to "tie the AI down" to the desired location by using the "Set Actor Location" Node.

The AI will now move through the landscape while staying on the ground and follow the player everywhere independent of any navigation volume. If it collides with trees or objects such as houses, a collision volume near the pawn's base will trigger a Blueprint containing a destructible mesh to spawn at the object's location, identical to the original object in size and appearance. By applying radial damage in the Event Graph of the blueprint the mesh gets destroyed. These two little tricks save FPS and revolutionize AI navigation for large creatures.

I'm happy!

S.M

Developer Diary 43

It's been a while since the last update, but I implemented some massive improvements. I recreated all Interaction-blueprints, because they were tied to the BP Event tick causing a major drop in FPS, added a new Game Over FX Volume and did some fine-tuning on the overall gameplay. Currently I'm rebuilding the AI Blueprint for the soldiers, so they will move through the world without the use of Navigation Volumes. On Monday I worked on the impact FX of the soldiers projectiles. It now causes a massive explosion close to Jonah, with smoke and a hail of rocks raining down on him during escape. For some reason he appears to get stuck in the ground when he's registered to chase the player ... can't figure out why. Worst case scenario I'll have to rewrite the behavior tree.

Developer Diary 42 - Maze Layout

Developer Diary 41 - Maze

I think I found a levelbuilding trick, that gives me the ability to incorporate day and night rhythms without using any dynamic light whatsoever .... I would also be able to change the entire atmosphere of the woods based on the player's location .... so I thought what if the entire woods are a maze system in which every section has four gates ...

Developer Diary 40

Why are these screenshots so significant?

Because they now represent a fully functional world in VR at 75 FPS, with 15 ms for GPU and 5 ms for Draw Call. Before today there was always something missing. Either grass or ground foliage or lighting or shadows or the navigation mesh took up too much space or something else .... but now it's all in there and it looks beautiful.
This includes a day night system, full foliage, items, AI, Dungeons, architecture and much more. Time to build the ACTUAL WORLD now, while keeping the fps at max.

Developer Diary 39 Final Layout

I've been working on a new art design for the game for several weeks now. I like this version of the overall atmosphere a lot better. Everything on 75 FPS VR.

Developer Diary 38

I'm moving back to the early artwork from 2014. The atmosphere is much stronger and there is barely any motion sickness while moving through the woods. Each level consists of a group of domes with holes in the ceiling. Pillar BSP's represent tree trunks and the ceiling holes are sources of static light for better orientation. Enemies are either invisible or hide in the darkness around the player. When he's engulfed by light, he is safe, but when he's moving through the darkness he's vulnerable to attacks.
Progress is very slow these days. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the old concept, while approaching it with all this knowledge that I acquired over the last two years. FPS remain high despite hundreds of point lights that are spread out across the domes, representing torches, electric lights or simply daylight - light shafts.

Getting there.

Developer Diary 37 - Architecture and Demotivation

Over the last week, I created seven major architectural segments based on Gothic architecture from 13th century Europe. Each segment took roughly 4 hours to complete. I planned these segments so I would be able to combine them in many different ways, creating enormous structures and palaces with little time input.

I finished the final Gothic cathedral top segment today and converted all other segments into static meshes. With those static meshes I built a large template palace to see how the structure would appear in VR and if I could keep my 75 fps.

While the framerate remained steady at 75 fps, the structures caused so much motion sickness in my head, I could barely keep my dinner down. I don't know what to do anymore. I'm severely demotivated. With all this time spent on another set of structures... and it looks like I can't even use the majority of them, because the gameplay itself will cause people to throw up.

The palace looks incredibly beautiful from the outside. Hell, if this whole thing were a desktop game, it would be the best thing ever. But there's a reason, why I want to build it in VR ... I think it all has to do with the size of the buildings: If each structural element is as tall as a skyscraper, motion sickness doesn't appear to be as bad. But if these structures are close to reality, something goes off in my brain that can't process the images accurately. It's the opposite of what you read online about VR. They all keep blabbering about: "OHHH You gotta keep the structures and door sizes realistic!!!! It's soooo important!!"

And it's pure bullshit. The smaller each hallway and building the worse it gets. And whether you like it or not: A realistic hallway, with realistic measures and realistic doors, is surprisingly narrow. And the FOV does the rest ...

I don't know whether I should be thankful or depressed about the fact that I'm so susceptible to motion sickness. Apparently there's an entire spectrum of people reacting differently to VR and if you want to sell your game, your level needs to be solid and cause no motion sickness whatsoever. But most developers stop noticing motion sickness triggers in their worlds, because they have gotten so used to their HMD. I never got used to mine. It's a nightmare. If I mess up my world, and get sick from it, I can't put on the glasses for several hours or I'll throw up immediately. Some developers keep it together by drinking bottles of whiskey, which is in my opinion the dumbest way ever to deal with this, because you don't fix a shitty level by getting drunk.

Then there are sooo many demos out there right now... they didn't give a shit about the FPS, so they thought: "Hey! Fuck  RAM and GPU efficiency, let's downscale the textures!" and it's like you're back in 1996 again.

I can't use too many foliage models or I'll lose my fps.´, which means I HAVE to use fixed structures as converted static meshes. I can't use the structures I created, because they cause motion sickness. I can't scale the structures, because then EVERYTHING is out of proportion. I can't use the monastery models to create the palace, because they were not designed to be used as "palace cells" and can therefore only be connected with each other in a single direction.

This just sucks in so many ways.

Developer Diary 36

What if each structure is larger and more complex in size? What if there's an architectural system that can combine single elements into enormous structures, which still look as aesthetic as if they were planned as a single building?

Developer Diary 35

This number cost me around 120 hours of work. Steady 75 FPS in Virtual Reality with Open World Streaming System, Day Night Rhythm, AI and while calling the Dharmapalas (also during Flight).

Developer Diary 34 From 30 FPS to 60 FPS

Sony released a quality threshold for VR games: Any game with a standard FPS rate below 60 FPS will get rejected. For the last two weeks I've been optimizing the project like hell to reach that number. With everything so far I'm almost getting up to a constant 55 FPS from the original 30 FPS with some performance spikes during large scenes and landscapes ...

- New Ocean Blueprint
- Total AI Overhaul (AI is now entirely relying on collision volumes for animations and DMG )
- Removed early Z-Pass
- Shadow settings overhaul
- Bought InstaLOD and created LODs for all landscapes and major meshes
- Incorporated those LODs (I'm still finetuning each setting, sometimes rebuilding them all)
- Post Process system overhaul (Removed a lot of settings in favor of Bloom)
- Incorporated the Oculus Forward Renderer for UE4 as seen in the Showdown Demo
- Created a holistic system of Culling Volumes
- Identified the Mip Map GPU performance bug (which lowered the PIE play for about 15 fps...)

Developer Diary 33 - Beaches, Bridges, Towers, Foliage

Damn ... I want to cut the trailer soooo badly. But I need to pull myself together and finish all setdressing elements first. I was working on the beaches today and made a couple of tests with instanced rock meshes. I'm not far off. Maybe another month or two and I'm there....

Developer Diary 32 Updates

This is what I've been working on for the last two weeks:

- Implemented Underwater Lightshafts and Random Fish Swarm Particle FX
- Lightshafts and Fish move with the rising Sea once the Manta is called
- Optimized the Ocean Blueprint to save FPS during gameplay
- Changed Water Reflection and Ocean Wave Material
- Created a script for the Exponential Height Fog component to rise with sea level

- Added AI for the Obersturmführer and Wehrmacht NPC
- Implemented Kill and Impact Volumes for Rifle Shots and set up associated Damage Scripts

- Fixed Dharmapala Scripts for Guivre, Pegasus, Begtse, Mahakala and Geruda.
- Created separate blueprints for each island building surrounding the monastery
- Replaced all previous meshes with Blueprints
- Created Visibility Volumes for each Building Blueprint
- Implemented "Tick Inactivity" when Blueprints are culled from the Viewport (massive FPS boost)

- Added a 6th Dharmapala, corresponding to the element water. The ice wolf freezes the sea and a blizzard rages down on Jonah's environment
- Fixed lighting and fog settings to work with the newest Oculus runtime
- Added streaming layers for each level and map component, including individual setdressing of the monastery and the island building interiors

Currently I'm working on multiple AI scripts and some finetuning of the Obersturmführer Aiming animations (I want his head and the gun to move with the flight direction of the player)

Developer Diary 31

Finally finished the Monastery City. The atmo is amazing and it's crazy fun to roam through the abandoned buildings and look for money and items. But I'm not too happy about texture resolution and material specular maps ... but I'm slowly getting there ...

Developer Diary 30

Found a second job to keep me above water for a couple of years...

Nobody ever talks about how damn hard this process is. I've set up two traders inside the monastery and added a basic monk AI. I want to finish the demo so bad, but I'm just exhausted to the core. Every day I spend hours on this damn world but I'm slow. I'm just so damn slow...

(Yes I know, the setdressing around the traders looks shitty, the font looks shitty, but at least the code works flawlessly and it's actually a really comfortable system to buy items while wearing the Oculus Rift)


I've had my first lucid dream, when I was 10 years old. I was in the woods, running from faceless, naked creatures together with a girl. We were hiding underneath the pine trees and we tried not to breathe so they wouldn't hear us. I still remember the smell of the pine tree as I was lying there. I remember how she pushed her hand on my mouth, so that I wouldn't make a sound. And I remember that we spent the night in front of a camp fire near a lake or a shore or a water source of some sort... even though I was aware that this was a dream, I didn't even think about changing the environment to my liking or trying to fly. I was way too involved in the dream itself.

Different dream, different day: I remember the manta's pulling me underneath the water. I remember soldiers in the woods, like machines looking for us. I remember the sound of the speakers that didn't really provide information of any sort ... they were just like ... a background sound. Like a radio show. In my dream they felt completely out of place, because they sounded so uplifting and comical at times.

One night I was in my hometown - but it wasn't my real hometown. It was a city on the cliffs next to a large building. Everything felt like home ... but the city was abandoned. (I figured the large building may have been the monastery and so I decided to add this city close to it as you can see in the Work-In-Progress screenshot above, which by the way forces me to handcraft an enormous amount of meshes again)

With time I found that all these places had a common core. They were all part of one world, sharing various aspects of a single environment. I just want to see them again, which is pretty much the main reason why I'm building this world.

There's this voice in my head that keeps shouting at me: "Just cut the trailer already!!!" There's a whole list of people that I have been promising a demo release over and over again. But it's not right yet. And the story's not right yet. There's something missing, something is out of place. Even though each day more and more pieces seem to fall into place.

The world around the monastery is a representation of Jonah's mind. The dharmapalas emerge from his inner qualities: Wrath - Fire / Equilibrium - Water / Determination - Earth a.s.o. They represent his light, his strengths. Even though they appear as "wrathful deities" at first, they are his greatest allies in the fight against his shadow (creatures, speakers, soldiers, the Wendigo, Silber). But he's not the only one who died on that battlefield, and he's not the only one stuck in this purgatory. I imagine the monastery might be filled with broken and wounded soldiers who seek refuge in between their trials in the woods. What about their allies? What about their lives? What about their fears, their thoughts? Would they interact with Jonah? Can they even see him? Would they experience the same environment that Jonah is experiencing? Would it TRULY be a battle royale between him and a group of people who died that night in the cross fire? Why would they make him out as the enemy? He didn't take part in the battle before his death after all ...

And my biggest problem right now: How can Jonah truly die, if he is already dead? Where is the element of danger? I always pictured something similar to the feeling of being pulled underneath by a group of mantas .... but if he gets shot in the woods .... how would that affect him? He's not stupid, he knows he's dead. He knows none of it is happening in the "real world". Why would he be afraid? Why was I so damn afraid in those dreams, even though I knew that they were just that?

I remember being afraid of  ... eternity. I felt that those mantas were limitless beings, and that scared me to the core. Everything in my daily life has boundaries of some sort. To come face to face with something that just has none, is beyond words. But how can I convert this emotion into a visual or auditory experience for the player?

Jonah's shadow is the reason he's dead. His shadow convinced him to kill himself before the soldiers even arrived. A second consciousness inside of him, that turns all his emotions, hopes and dreams upside down. Jonah loves, his shadow hates. Jonah builds, his shadow destroys. Jonah wants to get rid of his shadow, his shadow wants to get rid of him. He despises his shadow, his shadow despises him. And it eventually manifests in the "Wendigo" a creature that feeds on beings of the same kind - a cannibal.

Would the soldiers in the woods perceive Jonah's Wendigo? Would Silber and Sarah perceive the Wendigo? What is Silber's connection with the Wendigo? Silber lured those kids in between both army fronts. What if Silber is still alive, but Jonah perceives him as the Wendigo nonetheless?

Once the path down from the monastery to the water is finished, I can set up the shore on the other side with watchtowers and patrolling soldiers. The player can find chests and wallets of Reichsmark inside the abandoned houses and underneath the water. He can then use those to buy items or dharmapalas (of course he can only do that in the demo). The crawling giant from one of the earlier screenshots will hide underneath the ocean. When Jonah gets too close to the bottom of the sea, those creatures will crawl towards him and try to devour him. At the same time underwater canyons open up around the monastery. If the player dives down there, he will face the mantas.

I'm watching every single movie that contains a battle royale these days ... I need to listen to "Lakini's Juice" more often. After all it was the main inspiration for all this ...

"It was an evening I shared with the sun,
To find out where we belong,
From the earliest days,
We were dancing in the shadows"

LIVE - Secret Samadhi

Developer Diary 29

Built the architectural set dressing for the monastery (meshes, window arcs, crosses). Next up: benches, altars, candles, electric lights, pipes, tables and finally AI).

Developer Diary 28

I finally learned how to handle Behavior Tree, Blackboard, AI Controller, Services, Decorators and AI Character Blueprint communication - without Tutorials this time, because all these videos just drove me nuts. I need to release the demo and the trailer on Patreon near the end of this month, because I'm going broke ...  I'm getting a lot of inspiration from the Dark Project aka "Thief" series these days and I'm looking into "Shadow of the Colossus" as well. I still need to take care of the interior set dressing of the monastery and build a basic path from the monastery to the beach and into the woods. I'll need to fine-tune the AI from now on and work solely on gameplay and atmosphere until the end of this month. With a bit of luck I may be able to make it.