Category: Site

Travel

We're back from a great trip to Toronto which exceeded our expectations, all the buzz and diversity of a big city but full of beautiful quiet neighbourhoods, and of course the sights like Niagara a short drive away. Really impressed, and I'm not ashamed to admit it's really liberating being in an English-speaking country (although our German isn't bad, it's not really fluent conversational).

Cashgen

Cashgen, the realtime procedural terrain generator plugin for UE4 is pretty solid now after a few performance fixes that popped into my head on the flight back. I'm going to put that on the back burner for now, though I do plan to return to it in order to rework the foliage/mesh spawning system. My primary objective at the moment is expanding my gameplay programming toolkit, and that plugin has achieved about as much on that front as it's going to.

Cashgen Dev Thread on UnrealEngine Forums

Cashgen on Github

GOAPer

So, the next project! This is again going to be a plugin for UnrealEngine written in C++. Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) is an AI modelling technique that has been around for a while, but there seems to be nothing publicly available for UnrealEngine on this front, and AI is an area I really want to focus on, so it's a great fit. I'm currently just at the paper planning stage, reading up on various papers on the subject that have been compiled at the link below:

Jeff Orkin - GOAP articles

UnrealEngine User Group NRW

Our first Unreal Engine User Group NRW is next week on the 24th May in Düsseldorf. We're fully booked up with a waitlist but hoping to squeeze a few more people in, really looking forward to it, and Epic Games have been good enough to send a bunch of swag to hand out to the devs over a few beers.

First UnrealEngine User Group NRW on Meetup.com

That's it for now, more updates on GOAP coming soon!

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Category: CashGen

A whole week gone already! Despite the Easter holiday weekend being quite busy I managed a few good sessions working on the procedural generation code. Main progress this week :

  • LOD parameters for zone spawning
  • Biomes - Attributes for zone blocks that dictate which predefined static meshes will be spawned
  • Refactoring - Slowly updating code and commenting BP-exposed functions
  • Slope attributes on blocks, cliff biomes etc.

I have a small list of items to work on before I push a milestone branch to github :

  • Multiple LODs per zone
  • Dynamic LOD switching
  • Fix the seam normals!
  • Switch to a more robust noise implementation (OpenSimplex)

Here's a wee update of how we're looking at the moment:

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Category: Unrealengine

Progress on the procedural generation project has been going well, here's a little taster :

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Most obvious addition is the foliage spawning using UE's instanced mesh components, performance is pretty impressive so far, although the real test is when grass is added, ideally UE's grass components could be used but currently the only seem to work for static meshes, it may require some tinkering.

As the project now includes paid for assets, the repository has been moved onto a private Perforce instance, which means the Github version is now several weeks out of date. The plan is once the code is tidied up a little to start pushing a working build onto Github once a week or so, or whenever there's a reasonably stable build, the first of these should be this weekend. 

Category: Site

It's been a pretty mad week, a lot of new stuff and some really good training at work, and I've been hammering away on the procedural generation code. It's 1730 on a Friday now and I am clocking off for a well-deserved day or so away from a compiler to give me brain a rest. Here's a little video of what I've been up to:

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