Retopoligizing, more dialogue, and some research (Patreon)

Started in on the low poly for the female imp this week.  Most of her body is ready for UVs but there's a few shapes on her outfit that I think I'll tweak before doing their lows.

Still chipping away at never ending dialogue trees and quest scripting.  I'm hoping that with practice I'll get faster at this stuff.  

And also dug into a bit of the new UE5 landscape stuff in preparation for making the switch from 4.  Mostly trying to figure out the data layers stuff and if that would be useful - https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/world-partition---data-layers-in-unreal-engine/ 

I'm going to update the save system regardless when I make the jump to UE5 and I'm trying to plan that out beforehand.  The biggest hurdle is figuring out a light weight way of saving any actors' status and position as chunks of the world get loaded in and out as well as whenever the player spawns an item into the world.  

From my understanding in UE4 whenever the player would drop an item in the world it gets parented into the persistent world which is always loaded.  So if those items aren't deleted the amount of actors that would be in memory would continue to grow over the course of the game.  There was a workaround that I read that whenever an item was spawned you could read the currently loaded level, then set the owner of the newly spawned actor to something within that currently loaded level.  That way the actor isn't in the persistent but in that sublevel.  Which solves the problem of the persistent level ballooning over the course of play but then creates the problem of saving the data from that actor whenever the sublevel is unloaded and loaded.

So yeah, if anyone has experience with this stuff let me know :)  or if they've seen any tutorials or documentation on the subject.