Dienstag, 19. Juni 2018

Developer Diary 89 - Manta Palace Demo







This is a demo of the manta palace. I will have to rework the entire thing, because the proportions are mostly unrealistic. But the entire thing looks beautiful and works well on 90 FPS in VR.  I hate that I can't work on these things as much as I want to for the next couple of days. But I have to work on other things to earn money for food and electricity and stuff ..... at least I made some decent progress over the last week.

Montag, 18. Juni 2018

Developer Diary 88 - I'm on to something

How will I lead the player through the first level without craw call overload or GPU crash? How can I change day night rhythm without even changing the sun position and setting all lights to static? How can I introduce gameplay to him, while not making it too complicated, yet still keep it interesting? Well I think I found a way. The remake of "Shadow of the Colossus" was a big inspiration .... I've been cracking my head for weeks, months, even years about these issues.

First the player is led through a narrow path. He is surrounded by rocks and cliffs on both sides (HZB FTW!). He turns left and the entire world opens up to him. He's standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the entire world. In the far distance is the first palace. But there is no way to reach it. Yet.

The hunters daughter starts talking to him. She lends him the power of Mahakala (Manta) to cross the gap. He is now able to call each dharmapala once, overcoming difficulties ahead of him. Afterwards he is on his own, and he has to fight for the attention of each dharmapala so he can use them  at will. His path leads him towards the palace entrance and when inside he has to make his way down.

Day night rhythms are achieved through post process filters ("Shadow of the Colossus" uses them so well in the new PS4 remake).








Sonntag, 10. Juni 2018

Developer Diary 86 - Creating Diffuse, Specular, Bump & Normal Maps for Each Palace Asset

While working on recreating each palace model I realized, that the surface properties of each model were somehow lacking in depth and detail. I spent some time on youtube tutorials and reading the UE4 documentation on various material maps and learned how to create diffuse, bump, specular and normal maps from basic textures.



At the moment I am creating these map sets for each palace asset, working my way through each one with GIMP.






It's a lot of work, but when you look at the surface screenshot above, it is definitely worth it.



Dienstag, 5. Juni 2018

Developer Diary 85

Over the last two months I have been working on the following things:

- I incorporated updates for UE 4.18 and Oculus VR that eventually let me check the FPS again without engine load. Since I found that with this new landscape I couldn't keep 90 FPS regardless of optimization I had to downgrade my landscape models again.






- With UE 4.18 Epic's crew changed the way in which foliage culling works for all instances, so I learned how to adjust each foliage material to the new culling code and adjusted all 53 foliage models and their materials. Thank you Epic. Thank you so much. And by the way: The code displayed in the official Unreal Engine documentation is wrong. It actually looks like this:






- I wrote blueprints for Butterflies, Birds and Dragonfly AI. They swarm around the player when he is close to a spawn point and they look beautiful in VR. In order to stay on 90 FPS at all times I had to minimize their movement and tie their code and creation blueprint to the event tick.







- I'm currently working on an overhaul of the palace models. At first I wanted to create custom LODs for them, but now that I have rebuilt one of those models I realized I could minimize polycount drastically if I rebuild them from scratch. It is a lot of work, but it leads to a much more smoother overall look, great LODs and larger palaces at 90 FPS.