UDK – UE4 Small update.

So this week we’ve been mostly focusing on getting ALL the content in the game. I think I pretty much have every level in Ether fully built with all materials assigned too. I’ve added the majority of gameplay assets as well but a few are still missing here and there. My intention wasn’t to focus on the smaller details but rather try to blanket the entire game and get everything in place ready for lighting.

We finished lighting the Institute (start of the game) and have now moved into lighting Devlin mine. We’ve got a good 40/50 minutes of the game in place now. I can’t believe how quick the process is going. It’s quite an easy process to get content into UE4 and Blueprint along with the details windows are such time savers. You don’t realise how quick the workflow is until you move back into UDK to do something. There are ¾ less clicks in each action you need to do in UE4 so you can imagine how much time it saves in the long run.

Devlin, Harbour, Industrial, Village.

Optimsations

One thing that we really want to nail this time around is the game optimisation. We worked really hard to get the game optimised in UDK but I think we could have done a lot more. With the assets that we place to together frequently we’re in the process of exporting and combing them into 1 mesh. Our goal is to half the mesh count in each level since it was mostly the draw calls that were the biggest killer for performance. We’ll also cut polys that you’ll never see on the backs of rocks and large groups to make things smoother. By mid-sept we want a polished ‘Demo’ of the game which we’ll use for performance testing both on PC and Mac to check the frame rates we’re getting which we’ll use as a standard for the rest of the game.

I also bit the bullet and started re-creating all of our Matinees in the game. As you can imagine, there are quite a lot of them and that’s the most time consuming parts because all the keys, locations and sounds are timed to each other so you have to approach it key by key. Right now I have all the Matinees in place from the Chair sequence at the start, the middle of the game (I won’t be too specific there) and also the end of the game. The big Matinees left to do are the Restorations but I think I might just be lazy and leave that for someone else to do 😉

Not the cleanest Kismet in the top but you can see a good example of how clean Blueprint makes it.

Code side

I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on under the hood of UE4. Right now we’ve moved our ‘Trigger Items’ over into code. When we were working in UDK we set up a ‘TriggerItem’ class which acted like a use trigger. Since UDK wasn’t great for Use triggers by default, we created a custom class that you could assign a mesh to and when you clicked on it, that would be your use trigger in Kismet. This worked really well so we’re using the same approach in UE4 and this time we’re extending pretty much everything from it. In UDK we had different classes for levers, valves and audio items but this time we’re flowing everything from the TriggerItem class which should improve things a lot. It’s interesting to approach a game that’s already designed because when you’re designing a game things get implemented on the fly and are less efficient. Starting from fresh in UE4 allows us to know the outcome so that we can design everything as optimised as we can.

We’ve now begun the process of getting the 2 big systems in the game implemented – Dialogue and Pickups. They’re the main things we need to get the start of the game (Institute/Devlin Mine) gameplay complete. It also means that we’ll have a solid foundation for fleshing out the rest of the game. We’re prioritising the things that the art and design can spend time placing around the game so that code can keep busy with other things. We’re expecting these two systems to take a few weeks at the least so in the mean time we can be lighting the entire game which leaves us in a good place for Mid-Sept (Or that’s the plan at least :)).

Think that’s all for now. I’ll try to update another nice screenshot for next week so that you can see some more of the outdoor environments which I’m pretty excited to see lit too.