Developer Diary 132 - Had To Share This

 I recently feel the intense need to lie down in the moss, when I walk through this world ....

Developer Diary 131 - Progress

So this is what I worked on over the last month:

- I created 15 additional special locations, decayed houses and ruins (most of them hand-made)

 

- I did a complete overhaul of the forest floor and moss textures, using public domain photographs

- I created a custom day/night cycle from scratch, that is now matched with a clock and can be customized much easier than the default one I used until today (most time intensive aspect)

 

 

 

 

- At night there is now moonlight, that corresponds to the time of day

- Added various blueprints for weather effects that will soon be added to the Atmosphere Creator BP

- A compass system is attached to the player for testing purposes, but also for easier navigation

 

The next steps will be difficult ... I'll need to set up several social media accounts to have a good basis for future promotion and reroute them to this blog. I'll also need to implement Dynamic Material Collections into Lakini's Woods, so I can use effects such as earthquakes, forest fires, storms a.s.o .... DMC give me the ability to simultaneously control a massive amount of foliage instances and their surface properties (e.g. to make them look wet after the rain). But this stuff is still a long way down the road and includes some heavy lifting ....

Developer Diary 130 - Start The New Year With Self Built Architecture

 Spent the last month working on the following locations:

 

- Forest Mansion (5 Building Segments, 25 Rooms)

- Several Forest Huts & Houses

- Forest Shelters

- Beam Structures

- Overgrown Bunker

I created them manually with UE4 Geometry. Anyone who has ever created large scale buildings and structures in UE4 knows what a nightmare this is. I created all materials and textures from public domain photographs of moss, mushrooms and wooden surfaces. I used GIMP to individually create diffuse, normal, specular and bump maps (altogether 63 textures).

Various beings with individual stories reside in these locations and their past is tied to these places. These screenshots were made during a preliminary integration test. Ideally each of these locations is a separate blueprint, that can be placed at any location throughout the entire forest.

All the models I need for these locations (apart from furniture and interior decoration of these places) is now complete.

Ready for 2021.

Developer Diary 129 - Optimized Ivy, Trees, Ferns

 Progress ....

 

Developer Diary 128 - Raytracing & Volumetric Fog

Had some major breakthroughs this week .... all screenshots in world composition with 256 segments (7,5 km x 7,5 km) looking exactly like this, in VR on 90 FPS.

Developer Diary 127 - The Palace (Final)

82 Rooms, 82 hours of work.

Up until now I had always used pre-made gothic meshes of cathedrals and buildings to create temporary versions of the dharmapala palaces. 

This one is completely handmade, using assets from the UE 4 sun temple demo. Everything is adjusted to get the best results in VR. It looks beautiful and the rooms inside can be randomized to create various palace structures.

Developer Diary 126 - Architecture I

Spent almost 40 hours last week working on architecture ....  ideally all these segments can be randomized and combined at will. The biggest project right now is the palace entrance hall .... it will be the only segment that remains consistent throughout all palaces .... and it's a bitch .... so much work .... the lightmap optimization alone is insane ....