More environment work (Patreon)

Still a lot of temporary / placeholder stuff but the map updates are coming along well.  The first shot is the new approach to town and the second shot is of a new procedural foliage forest set I'm putting together.  I started using a lot more of UE4's built in tools for things like the procedural foliage, the roads and a lot of other props are using spline meshes, that combined with switching the map over to using the world composition tools seems to have sped up the overall workflow and saved on memory and performance.  

For anyone working on their own projects or just wants to know what world composition is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrcNClb6KUI 

and the spline mesh stuff, in this case the landscape implementation: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmfMJi4jaRc 

I was also looking a bit more into shaders, fluids, and raymarching.  Does anyone have experience with this stuff and knows of any resources?  I think a lot of other adult games are using metaballs for their fluids?  I also get the impression that the shader code gets updated with some UE4 engine builds and I'm not experienced enough with this stuff yet in order to keep things updated.  As an example I was working from a tutorial from this guy:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yblxol_eCc4   and had the basic material working in 4.25 then I updated to 4.25.1 and it broke the material and the smooth transition became broken and banded.  

I almost have the save system fixed which required rewriting part of the attribute systems.  But while I was in there I also started working on character stats and experience points.  I'm going to implement a basic XP system at first, start testing that, and see how people feel about it.  At this point I think the leveling system will be similar to Fallout 1 with base stats, skills, and probably perks.  That's all subject to change of course but that's the current direction.