It has been quite some time since my last update. At the start of July I began working on two of the largest commercial projects I have ever been a part of at my 'day job'. Little did I know that the sheer amount of raw work paired with the very aggressive deadline (spoiler: both due at the same exact time) meant that I would have no energy left for literally anything else until those deliverables were out the door. Each week I would tell myself "I'll get an update out this week!" or "Maybe next week I will be able to focus some of my time on the game!" but alas, weeks turned to months and I started to feel pretty low about it. My goal was vanishing in front of my eyes as I traded my times for profit at work.
Everything is about balance, though, and for my own mental health I could not bring myself to spend 10-12 hours a day at work and then log out only to log back into another grind in front of the computer. I have been spending more time working out when I am not on the PC and that has helped keep me moving. I am quite excited to see the end in sight for these major projects and I am relighting the torch and marching toward my goals in game development... starting with this blog post!
I will say this...
Every single game idea I have ever had that did not ship was because I simply lost interest or motivation to continue.
This time, I was being pulled away from an idea I have an incredible amount of interest in due to work. Being able to resume this work and stay motivated was a big fear of mine. Every day past June 23rd (one hundred thirteen days) that I did not make another blog post, I felt like I was drifting further and further into a place where Pandemonium would be just another failed game idea that I never released because work and life happened and I simply lost interest. "Not this time!" I told myself as I fired up Unreal and dusted off the tomes (read: scribbly notes) I left for myself as breadcrumbs for when I returned to Anduraen.
I have not lost interest and I will ship this game no matter what!
This is my mantra and even if I have to take breaks from my original plan to balance this epic quest with my personal and work realities, I need to stay motivated and keep grinding.
While I have not spent much of the summer working on the game, I have resumed ticking things off the ever-growing To-Do list and I am proud to share the recent progress!
Implemented replication for equipment and inventory
Players can now equip gear from their inventory onto their equipment slots
Players can click to equip and unequip items in item slots and hot bars
Players can click to consume items in item slots
Increased framerate an additional 10ms by using regions in the world partition to load less environment cells around the player
Turns out loading the entire game world at the same time and then optimizing to 60fps is probably way too aggressive!
Enabled spatial loading on PCG components to make sure they respect world partition grid cell loading and don't just hang out in the game world always loaded in memory
Fixed a bug when dragging equipment and inventory windows and dropping them causing the interfaces to disappear
Players can now drop and pickup items in the game world through a common world actor class
Added deer, wolves, and squirrels to the game
Fixed user interface anchors to properly scale and anchor to any screen size
Fixed the scale modifier in place on the player frame to prevent a bug when dragging the player frame slightly offscreen
Fixed failed to import property bugs in 5 different classes
This seems to be a bug in Unreal with file corruption. The only way I found to fix it is to rename the variables in each offending class (from 'foo' to 'foo1' and back to 'foo'), compiling and saving.
Created a new auto landscape material for the northern region with snow and cliffs
Increased landscape cell loading distance to 25000 to match the cell size to avoid major popping in of large environment objects
Spent time shaping the overall landscape and smoothing rough edges to block out the game world and regions
Added ability to split stacks of items when holding shift and clicking the stackable item
Fixed a bug where correct user input would not result in splitting a stack of items in inventory
Player armor and weapons no longer display when completely zoomed into first person view
Added Super Texture Collection mega bundles 1 & 2
Added Fantasy Icons Megapack to start populating the item tables
Modified DefaultEngine.ini file with updated multiplayer assumptions
[/Script/Engine.Player]
ConfiguredInternetSpeed=100000
ConfiguredLanSpeed=100000
[/Script/OnlineSubsystemUtils.IpNetDriver]
MaxClientRate=100000
MaxInternetClientRate=100000Modified DefaultGame.ini file with new values for the Game Network Manager
[/Script/Engine.GameNetworkManager]
TotalNetBandwidth=600000
MaxDynamicBandwidth=25000
MinDynamicBandwidth=12000Began populating the game world with procedurally generated content and stress testing density filters for PCG
Here's a set of fun images stress testing performance improvements against many different time of day and weather presets. The forest shown below was generated procedurally.
To help keep me from becoming demotivated, I have decided not to impose a strict "must post weekly" type of cadence on my blogs. As part of balancing work and life with my hobbies, I found that doing that had the opposite effect - the further I got from the last post the easier it was to say "why even fire up the editor" which is a dangerous place to be as a creative.
Cheers,
Vinny
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