Procedural Generation Progress
- Category: Unrealengine
A few changes since my last update, I'll break it down!
- Boids code was working fine in Unity
- Decided I need a world to put the boids in order to make something worth looking at
- Decided my coder art sucks, so I might as well work on some procedural generation (bonus skills!)
- Built a procedural world generator in UnrealEngine C++
It's been going pretty good so far. I've built a heightmap with some Perlin noise, then used the UnrealEngine UProceduralMeshComponent to turn it into a quad mesh. I've then made a 3x3 grid of these zones which seamlessly tile. At least, now they seamlessly tile, had a few stitching issues initially!
All resolved now though, by expanding the zone heightmap to include the first cells in neighbouring zones to make sure the vertices match up.
Next up: spawning new zones as the player moves across boundaries, as well as destroying the old ones. Performance will be interesting here, I suspect I will be spawning threads to do this work ahead of time.
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Weekly Update
- Category: Unrealengine
Time is flying! I do plan on writing an article each week, but things keep getting in the way, so here I am on a Sunday evening. I won't lie, The Division Beta has consumed a fair bit of my time this weekend, but today I did spend most of the afternoon working on the UnrealEngine boids code. In fact, the core boids algorithm is pretty much done, now I'm building up a UI, PlayerController etc. around it with a view to making something kinda playable. It's been an interesting experience getting something working in UE4, one thing I have learned is that they really, really want you to use Blueprints! Getting some things done in C++ is a bit of a mare and the documentation is sparse in comparison. Anyway, most of the learning work is done now, I'm starting to pad out the game with more types of boids, implement a repel/attract value and a few other things. I have some ideas for a game that could come of this but it's going to have to be the product of what appears while I'm tinkering.
No new videos for now, although I will say the code will happily chug 6-700 boids around after a few revisions. More than enough for what I need. I expect to have a lot more visually interesting things to show this week.
Boid Updates
- Category: Unrealengine
Still ploughing through the tasks here at cashworth HQ, mostly breaking the hump of the UMG system and UE4 architecture. Adding in a UI to enable adjustment of algorithms on the fly, amongst other things. Progress is being made! I've still got a lot of tidying up to do, and a round of optimisation before I'll do a proper write-up. In the meantime, here's some boidy video grabs.
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UnrealEngine Beaten
- Category: Unrealengine
Got all the UE basic structure, pawn, controller, posession, level, gamemode etc. sorted out now. Boids behaving well with blueprints, Unreal Motion Graphics UI hooked up, now I can get back to writing gameplay code!
Here's the level graph, pretty straightforward. Looking to getting this optimised and packaged for people to use.
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