November has come... and went.

Hi, Geril here.

Another month full of work.
And we didn't have much time for anything else.

At the end of last month, I got my hands on a GPD Win 2, and I'm having a lot of fun with it.
This is more of the same as my old GPD Win, but more powerful - and with better button positioning.
Games run on it OK, but I'd hardly be satisfied with that only. What I want is to work, and to be able to work anywhere. And Unreal Engine 4 is running on it quite well.
Nothing really surprising, but with forward rendering, the little machine can manage itself quite well.
Lussy and I have some ideas for smaller games, but with this much work, we only have free time when we're on a train, bus or in a car. But with this palmtop, we can make things on the go.

And we've also done some home improvement stuff, like printing out old video game boxes for cartridge-based games we have, in miniature, just-fitting form, and we bought some cartridge cases as well.
So we can have a classic game collection that isn't just grey cartridges on top of each other.
But again, for that, we need some time to work on it a bit, cut out the boxes, and print out labels.

But to be honest, we're very tired. We work all day and then we go to sleep, just to wake up to work some more.
We're looking forward to having some time for ourselves.

Continuing a past project!

This month, we went back to one of our older projects that we were stuck on. It was this one, originally intended to be a character that utilizes mesh swapping for expressions. We decided to go ahead and make her into a more regular character so we can use her on any platform. She still has a video game associated with her, but it's only at the concept phase and so we're just concentrating on the character for now.

We plan to publish a scene with her on Sketchfab, because it's been *checks Sketchfab* almost two years since we've published anything (but we're still getting new followers).
We probably won't let it be an actual 2 years of hiatus.

For now, it's still a work in progress of course, but we'll share some images anyways.

 

We decided to continue this character because we've been having a rough time with work and we're a little burnt out. I (Lussy) am tired of working with Blueprints all the time, and it's been about a year since I properly textured anything, and Geril's happy to be working with only a few bones and a basic rig. So I got to texturing and Geril made the mesh, rig and animations as usual.

For now, we only concentrated on the face and mimicry, so the body is a work in progress in every aspect.

In other news, we finished a prototype of the Oregon Trail project in the first week of the month. Because we worked with a history teacher, we took his advice and made the game more quiz-like. Now the baked project is in full Hungarian, and we haven't really made any new assets for it, just used some from the previous historical projects.
It's not that impressive or anything – it was done quite quickly – but it has a lot of modules and possibilities.
Here's a video.

Remaking old stuff!

So after last month, we continued working on Project OLP.

Our current concept of OLP is heavily based on this GDC video by David Rosen (we highly recommend checking this out!).

We've created our player character's movement animations by hooking up poses only and blending them from blueprints. The only actual animation sequence we used was the idle animation.

And her tail and ears are physically active.

We've also cleaned the project out of all outdated assets and code and started almost from scratch with all the experience we've gained since we last worked on this. It's kind of cathartic to be able to start it all over and have development go so much faster and smoother.




We're almost caught up with all the features that were present in the original project, only now they work better and the Tick event isn't as badly overused as it used to be (still looking for ways to optimize blueprints, though).

(Sorry about the last frames of the gifs, our capture software likes to mess things up as it stops capturing. Also, I'd like to note that it's impossible to arrange inserted pictures in this editor.)

Now that we could actually create some gameplay elements as opposed to only being able to move the character around, we've been creating pickup objects that can be used for combat, or as usable items. Geril is modeling all sorts of random things that players will be able to throw at each other when they don't have a weapon equipped. You'll be able to pick up most objects you see, and even destroy things to make more objects for yourself – if a wall shatters, you'll be able to take the bricks and throw them at your opponent. Different objects will have different properties and special effects: for example, a glass vial will shatter, leaving shards behind that will hurt whoever walks into them.

You can expect more to come in relation to this, we're kind of on a roll here.

Rendering huge crowds in Unreal 4! (Also, we moved!)

Hey, this is Lussy.

This month has been a particularly tiring one. We moved into our new apartment together, so we're still adjusting to all the changes, and we're still trying to find everything that we can't find since then. Like console memory cards.

With this move, however, we finally have a real home office! We both got new desks and lamps, so hopefully our persistent back pain and eye strain will go away. One day. One day soon. Please.
While Geril got himself a regular desk, I opted for an adjustable standing/sitting desk. So maybe the back pain will turn into leg muscles. Who knows. It's good to have the option of standing up while working, anyways.

In other news, we've been working on a massive background-crowd system. You know how in war scenes you have to show large crowds marching forward, or running into the enemy? That's what we're working on, but inside Unreal 4.

We already had a smart crowd system that could react to other crowds and even initiate combat with each other, but no computer could handle rendering 10 000 of those soldiers all at once in Unreal. So we made a simple crowd that can only march forward at various speeds and follow the terrain's slope. For this purpose, we decided on creating 3-frame 'animations' for characters: 3 static meshes that would alternate while marching, like a flipbook. These static meshes don't strain the engine so much, so we could easily show more than 10 000 of them, while also giving the crowd the illusion of being animated.

The static meshes had to be heavily simplified for LODs, and Geril did all of that by hand. This is what our simplified horsemen's LODs look like:

Pretty... artsy.

So, that was our approach for creating a very light crowd in Unreal 4. Would you do this differently?

Until next time!

Monthy ramble!

This month we've honestly just worked our asses off so there isn't much else we could write about, and we can't really write about that either, so...

We've upgraded our PCs - I (Lussy) only got a GTX 1070 video card, but Geril replaced his whole machine and it was painful.
We got him a socket TR4 motherboard, a Ryzen CPU, a Vega64 video card and some ram, but when we first put them together, the PC couldn't start up. We had to get another stick of ram to actually get into the UEFI. Then we had to flash the BIOS to get the video card and the other stick of ram to work. This took quite a while, and now he has 32GB ram instead of the planned 16...
So if you buy a recently released motherboard, just be prepared to deal with this.

When it's turned on, the whole thing lights up like a Christmas tree.

In other news, we've barely had time and energy to sit in front of a TV to play games, so we use the Switch a lot. We've seen lots of people just shrug off the portability factor of the Switch, but for us and our lifestyle, it is a godsend - we prefer anything portable over having to sit still in front of a huge screen for long periods of time, since that's what we do for a living, anyways... And we like taking long baths and now we can even play Skyrim during them.

We also try to play our PS4 frequently, but it's really inconvenient that we have to charge the controller every 2-3 hours (seriously, what's up with that battery life?), and, since we finish work well after midnight, we have to turn the volume all the way down and kill the subwoofer. With the Switch, the screen is just the right size that we don't have to sit too close to it and it's not tiring to hold, either. It's also pretty convenient that we can bring it with us to long train rides and family gatherings, where we can split the controller and play Mario Kart with other people.

As developers thought, we have to say that the Switch, while more powerful than last-gen consoles, isn't as powerful as the current generation of home consoles. That won't stop us from aiming to develop for it, however, because it seems like the Unreal 4 gets excellent support for the platform. We always keep in mind how we can tone down the stuff we make so that they will run on the Switch. Right now we're using the GPD Win as comparison: if it runs on the GPD, it will surely run on the Switch, too.

That's it for this month's ramble, we hope we'll be able to talk about or show more interesting stuff in the future.