No gameplay this time, but a bit of #gamedev
The previous vines weren't useful in level design, so I added about 150 new sprites to animate all directions the vines can grow. I mapped them to a datatable and updated the actors based on 4 simple raycasts.
The leaves are just added on top for more variations.
Gah, every so often this catches me out and makes me hate Blueprints.
Beware of implicitly re-evaluated pure BP functions! They can really screw you up. I know this, I've hit it before, but I completely missed this one and it was baffling me for about half an hour until I realised. Debugging BPs is kind of crap anyway and everything looked correct going into the loop, but it kept not executing as many times as it should. It was because Length was getting called every iteration 😡 #ue5
I’m busy learning Unreal Engine 5 by making my very own virtual island
Unreal Engine 5 is both easy and very challenging. It is easy in that most of what you want to do is all menus, settings, layers, and selecting from some amazing 3rd party textures, materials, etc.
The challenging part comes in actually understanding what ...continues
Making 3d models with pixel-art textures takes much more time than a single sprite, but the effect adds a lot to the scene I might redo the ruins later to add more depth.
First they deprecated the Input Action and I said nothing.
Then they deprecated the Input Axis and I said nothing.
Then they deprecated Skeletal Meshes and I said nothing.
No. Wait a minute. Yes I did. There's just no stopping people who like to compartmentalize in the interest of simplicity.
What once were simple text files are now data structures referring to other data structures referred to millions of times in-game, which I'm sure is super efficient! Yay? #UE5#UnrealEngine
I can't explain why #UE5 launcher version is behaving itself better than UE5 built from a github clone. They're allegedly identical. VS 2022 is supposed to be okay to use. Next time I get ticked off at it crashing a lot I might try VS 2019. I mean, perpetual crashes was the reason I went to building my own - and for a while it seemed more stable. Guess not.
Oh, thank you, divine god of #UE5. Thou hast chosen to allow my game to enter thy holy editor. And I haven't died of old age yet? Your humble servant is not worthy.
Oh, blessed divine god of UE5, grant me the power to edit my own code in thy editor without the devil GPU CRASH fouling thy holy creation and my patience.
3rd GPU CRASH of the day. Got nothing done between the last 2 because they both crashed after I detached a ladder from a building and RIGHT-CLICKED ON IT IN THE OUTLINER ASSET LIST!
It takes the better part of AN HOUR to get the damn thing restarted and get to where I was!
#UnrealEngine created a piece of trash and called it #UE5 - spare yourselves and don't bother. They're all-in for video production. Game development was left to people who NEVER USE THE WORST EDITOR EVER WRITTEN BY ANYONE!
Another GPU crash in #UE5. Not the game. The editor. Not running the game. Editing the game. What was my sin this time? Move View To Item was too much for it to handle. Everything is too much for the UE5 editor.
The #UnrealEngine page listing what hardware we need to develop for UE5 is fanciful nonsense. No combination of hardware known seems likely to be capable of powering the UE5 editor.
I wish now that I'd not decided to use #UnrealEngine to make a game. #UE5 has many nice features and the editor from hell. It's bad enough when it crashes in-game WHILE NERFED. It crashes in the editor when OPENING A WINDOW.
I've tried the default code.
I've tried building the default code.
I've tried changing GPU usage parameters.
Nothing makes a difference to this absolute pig that has set my work back months & added hours of frustration awaiting a restart of the editor after every vomit.
God forbid I make any progress on this (*)( game. #UE5 What was my sin? Opening a window. Heavens! What a horrible act for an EDITOR!
The game is nice. The UE5 editor is overripe garbage unfit for any lesser computing power than an array of supercomputers at a data center.
Crash number 1000, easily. I've already Nerfed the graphics and I'm using a 3070ti. Is there a 30070? Maybe it could service the GPU's insatiable appetite WHEN IN AN EDITOR! 🤨 👎
I should boot the video game editor to see if gremlins finished the code while I was working on music and installing other code on another computer.
Okay.
While the #UE5 game is booting up I'll get some things done around here, learn a new language, ponder the essence of time and space, build my very own android, travel to the Andromeda galaxy, create world peace, magically disarm all bad guys with guns, eradicate poverty, destroy all nuclear weapons, make fusion power work & launch satellites
OK, this week's main job is done; adding voiced dialogue support to my #UE5 open source dialogue system, SUDS. It's all merged in now, so check it out if you want!
Next week I'm back to working on SUDS Pro, which adds a whole bunch of extensions outside plain dialogue, like doing camera cuts, playing Level Sequences, triggering character emotes, and a reference UI implementation.
Made some progress cleaning things up in #UE5 until I selected 3 words in a text field and began to type, replacing them. This is strongly frowned upon by the #UE5 editor today, so it crashed.
Speaking of which, I asked the editor to fix broken redirections.
After the progress bar drops, the landscape flashed back and forth between its actual state and its rendered state. That eventually stopped and the drive light was then on solid for a while. Now it's less flashy. It should be stable any minute now, although I'm not certain in which hour that might be. #UE5
This was because it refused to render a character mesh in the editor, but would in-game just fine. Visibility is on.
I should have started the game editor before I ran an errand. The good part of booting #UE5 up is you have time to take a shower, start some laundry, eat lunch, catch up with friends, start a journal, watch every episode of that show you've not watched for 8 years, rebuild your car's suspension, start a blog, run a marathon, swab the deck of an aircraft carrier, bring about world peace, fly a space ship to Pluto, read all of Shakespeare's works, read all of Mark Twain's works, learn a language..
It took a bunch of tries, but the AI monk I want to have wander inside its church is now wandering inside its church.
It would either stand in one place or get outside the building and never go back in. Other AIs went in and out, so it was a bit perplexing. Still don't know what its problem was, but it's working now.
This is where we save the game and leave well enough alone.
On to the next AI! #UE5 is never not a love-hate relationship.