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With the jump to Unreal 5 there were a lot of things that had to be changed, rewritten, and updated.  So this week I really focused on getting things back together and running again.  

  • The day / night cycle has been revamped to work with the new lighting features and has been streamlined to hopefully run better.
  • Fog got reworked so now the coloration can be adjusted smoothly over time.  This setup works a whole lot better for adding night fog actors. 
  • With the day/night cycle updates I reworked lamps and lanterns to smoothly light up during the night.
  • Reworked the sky dome and stars - this has been a headache with the new world partition and balancing streaming distance with distant meshes.  I think I have a decent solution working right now but it needs to be fully tested.
  • Reworked the door system to work and properly load unload world layers.  This should be faster than the old system that would load entirely separate levels. 
  • Spawn points now work with the day / night system and can have different spawns depending on time of day.  
  • The rough framework for NPC schedules is also in place - so an NPC during the day can be out at their day job fishing or mining during the day, at the tavern in the evening, and then back at home at night.

Oh and I hooked up the rough building interiors for the swamp town.  Now I just need to add the spawn points, finish the dialogue trees, and start adding the quest logic.  

I also need to update the colors and lighting in that screenshot.  Still a ton of polish to do of course but the big stuff is working so far.  

The next big thing to do is the frog dungeon and the quests for the swamp area.  Then I should be able to finally get this build out.  We'll see if anything during the build process has changed in Unreal 5 too.  

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Comments

boobsgames

I'm curious about the NPC schedules - are you planing them to be walking from one place to another, or will they be just teleported there?

slaen

Just faking it for now and teleporting the NPC based on what time of day it is when the player touches a collision volume for the spawn point. The biggest reason is that how I'm handling the external and internal spaces the one gets unloaded when the other is loaded. So if an NPC is walking on the road in town and the player enters the tavern that NPC is then walking in empty space and has nothing to pathfind on or even to collide with. I might try adding some extra smoke and mirrors though. So say a character is walking to the mines for work for the day. I can spawn them far enough away and then set waypoints along the road for them to follow so it will hopefully give the feeling that they're moving around in the world and not completely static. At least that's the plan right now.