BIOASSHARD DEV REPORT 5/17/2022 (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Here back again. So, as I mentioned in the previous report, I was almost finished with the “upgrade from scratch” process. And, that’s finally done!

Looks like that, fortunately, this time there wasn’t any major errors. On top of that, I tried to make a build and tested it. The building process went smoothly as well and I managed to test a couple missions with no problems at all (the save game it’s also working for now out of the box). I went ahead and even defeated the Boss in about 18 minutes (such a boss I am myself, huh XDD). Anyways, I got no errors at all (but I didn’t get any in the previous releases as well, so I can’t be used as a reference to guide by in this matter).

Now, it’s time to get on to the new mechanics implementation, which is the main purpose of this new version :P.

One thing I want to mention though, is that -in case someone got it wrong and thought it was- this engine update is NOT to Unreal Engine 5. That update won’t come just yet. Even if the UE5 is officially out now, there’s one big gap to cover, necessary to upgrade to it.

Apart from the obvious increase in the hardware requirements to work with it (as well as to play games made in it), there’s one big task that needs to be done for previous version projects to work on UE5 and that is, that ALL the particle systems have to be ported to the new system.

From its beginning UE4 came with a Particle System creation tool, called Cascade. This is the tool I’ve been using during all this time for the particles on Bioasshard. Then quite some time ago, Epic implemented a new revolutionary -or so they say- tool, called Niagara. I’ve never had the time to get myself into this new tool, so I kept using Cascade. But looks like with this new UE5, they’re deprecating Cascade and are forcing to get all the particle systems converted to Niagara (this is mentioned in one of the first videos published right after the official release of UE5 some weeks ago).

So yeah, that’s something that will take some time to get done, and I don’t want to spend that time right now while there’s still more important things/aspects to work on for the project. I’ll have to take the time to learn about the Niagara systems in depth and then make the conversion of the hundreds of particle systems used… sounds like lots of fun will come XD.

And this is going to be it.

See ya in the next report!

Much love <3 everyone!

-Meguido