Sometimes it feels like you get nothing done. Between some clean-up, fixing issues, and trying new things that were the case. I ended up creating more work for myself than what I got done. At least there is some good news in all of it.
Issues With Icon Alpha Channel
A while ago I noted when mass importing into Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) that quite a few of the icon images for armor and weapons were getting messed up. I tried some simple fixes on my end with no luck before diving into some research in hopes of finding some answers.
Long story short UE4 is showing about 90 icons as not having an alpha channel. As a result, I have to use a program to add the alpha channel. Since I’m using the free version of that program I then have to open it in another program to save it in a format UE4 will register the icons as having an alpha channel enabled.
A bit of an odd issue to have in the first place. Even more so having to use multiple programs to get the result I want. At least this was not an issue on the majority of the almost 600 icons.
This also led to another issue. I did not have around 600 icons import in. It appears one late night when I was working on things I was not being as organized as I thought I was. Some icons made it into the correct folders and into the game others did not.
Hopefully, over the weekend I’ll wrap this stuff up. Along with getting it converted over to my main project. This will require some manual labor as my testing project and the main project are not clones of each other. Many components of the new inventory system are not in the main project. There is also a lot more testing that needs to be done.
Fixing Some Stuff On The Main Project
Back during mid-May, I released an exploration zone demo for people to try out. This was mainly to get people to test out the zones themselves and see what kind of issues cropped up.
One issue that got brought up a lot from those who have higher screen resolutions them me was people having UI issues. Part of it was due to old and no longer used UI elements not being viewable for my resolution but at 4k+ they could be seen on the screen. Those have been cleared up. I had forgotten some stuff that was outside of the field of view in the UI widgets.
There were also some "texture issues" reported as in people not happy with how the game looks. Yep, not much I’m going to be doing about that. I’m a solo indie game developer on quite the budget. Perhaps my next game after this will have higher resolution textures.
Some also reported issues with the background music. I made some slight changes to how I was handling sound blueprints. Not a whole lot I can do since I’m not an audio guy, not looking to hire, and not looking to pay for fancy things.
Random crashing. Nothing I could track down on my end. Hopefully, there are no widespread issues that will show up later.
Blocking volume that was causing an issue Abyss. That was slightly adjusted.
There won’t be an updated version of the Zone Exploration Demo since it’s quite a chopped-down version of the game itself. With quite a few things disabled or removed so the main focus could just be on the zones. Which would require double work on my end to make those changes to it as well. The changes will however appear in the combat and loot demo.
Unreal Engine 5
Not too long ago I finally got early access to Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). This was supposed to happen much earlier in the year. I thought I would at least give it a try and see how things went. UE5 is not ready for production usage and my project has quite a few issues with it.
While I did not too long ago upgrade to the latest UE4 version giving myself a possible upgrade path to UE5. . Some modules I use also are not ready for UE5 from what I could tell as well. After getting my project into UE5 it failed to compile and a lot of issues I rather not think about.
I also did take a look at some of the example projects UE5 has and I could not even run them. They required 32 gigs of ram with a recommendation of 64 gigs of ram. Not to mention my graphics card is getting a bit older and lacks the supporting features it needs.
While it would have been cool to make this a UE5 project I just don’t see that happening at this point. A lot of the main features for doing so I rather lack from a computer capacity standpoint to even take advantage of.
While they suggest that projects looking to come out late in 2022 could be candidates for using UE5. With how late into the year the early access was made available I would not be shocked if they were a bit late on their target for when UE5 will truly be ready for production level.
As such I’m going to keep my project as UE4 for now. Some features from UE5 have been making it over to UE4. More times than not I can’t take advance of them anyways. Even more so when you run into issues and you can’t solve them on your own without doing further research that yields zero results with everything being so new.
Final Thoughts
Many elements of working on this game are starting to drag on further than I like. Hopefully, I’ll be done with them soon.
Other Posts:
- 49. Game Development | Menus And Settings
- 50. Game Development | Massive Increase In Items, Crafting, And Zone Loot Tables
- 51. The Inventory System That Broke Me
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Nightly Dungeon and Unreal Engine 4
Game roadmap.
Dude, your one man game development effort is awesome.
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Thanks.
Nice, slowly but surely...
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It's at least going slowly. Perhaps the other part over time :)
Squashing bugs and doing clean up never feels very glorious but it needs to be done too. 😀
We ended up running into some issues with UE5 as well with our only little bit of C++ work. It was always kind of buggy though so ended up just rebuilding it in blueprints and now it works much better. Noticed yesterday most plugins and such are still only UE4 also. We do not really use these so had not noticed. You are probably also right that it will not be production ready when they say it will be. So sticking with UE4 is probably the best choice.
Keep up the good work! Progress is progress, just have to stay focused.
Most of the stuff I do tends to be in blueprints. Glad you were able to redo it and get things to work. Overtime I’m sure they will be making it easier for projects to convert over as they update UE4.
Blueprints are pretty nice. Did not expect that going into it. Though we need some AI characters to function at different angles and Unreal's Nav Mesh Bounds only seems to work on Z oriented grounds and a small angles. Like wall and ceiling walking. Cannot find much on the subject. Probably going to have to go to C++ for that. 😕
Unreal engine is actually good, I have never used it before, but I have used unity,I would give UE a try.
Great work.
Hopefully next year UE5 will be in a production level state.
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