Been researching a little bit on the different technologies of what is/going-to-be available and there is a lot of cool stuff in development. One is I’m currently using voxel for terrain procedural generation and biomes which you can terraform or sculpt on top of that terrain. Very cool stuff but it is limited such as the render distance is in chunks and it has to load everything before it you see it. Would be nice if there was an imposter system like having an opposite version of UE5’s World Partition where it could load a preset imposter out of the area and de-render when in range but load the proper voxel chunks in replacement. Voxel2.0 is around the corner and it’s completely being rewritten so hopefully we get performance/tools for something like that.
Another cool plugin I found since I was looking into water/ocean solutions is Fluid Flux and Libra Liquids. Fluid Flux is very impressive but only problem that most people overlook is that it’s 2D, meaning you can’t have a cave and let it fill up that cave. But Zibra Liquids is 3D and does exactly want you want with it. It’s one of the most impressive liquid sims I’ve seen which it is very similar to Nvida Flex’s water sim. It’s very performant for what it does. Only problem is it’s kinda buggy with the new versions of UE and I haven’t really gone into it much for it to work with multiplayer but apparently it’s not supported for it. But I have a lot of faith in these guys and keen to see the future of this plugin because you can do a lot with this.
AI is slowly getting to games especially with generative conversations which I touched on last blog. Zibra Liquids is actually computed by AI with it’s Analytic collision solution (convex collisions).
I haven’t really got much else to really report on since I’ve been really busy with balancing IRL and game dev. But I do have an actual job now. Centrelink was on my ass so I got an offer. It’s working with my sister’s cleaning business. When houses get built, they come in to clean it up and what not. I do the bookwork side of things and have been doing it for a while as a side fortnightly thing but now I’m doing 2 days a week for $500 which is pretty decent and give me the rest of the time to game dev.
So it wont really impact my game dev process much at all. Btw, remember that time where I said I haven’t gotten my forklift licence from a while back? They said I can’t do anything about it because the guys that supplied the courses wont get back to them and I dont know how that works legally but it’s just left in the dust just like that. Fkn retarded.
Since I’m earning a bit more than what I usually get, I’ve thought about this for a while but it was the idea of hiring someone to gather more ideas to what I already got. For people that don’t know, I have a page of 1900+ dot points of ideas which I’m currently migrating to a database. So the person I’m kinda hiring is my mate that I’ve know for my whole life basically and I usually call him the Human Encyclopedia because he knows a lot from news articles to conspiracy theories, and has a lot of ideas of games in general. So that will help in the long run.
So the run down since last time, I’ve mainly going through the phase of landscape solutions and redefining the Demonstration area for showcasing everything. Which I did result in using the voxel plugin. Also going through a lot of tutorials and even a mini course on it since it’s a bit of a learning curve. Also implemented biomes and islands; I haven’t gotten too deep into the terrain generation but it’s similar to Minecraft in a sense but with islands with various sizes and random spaces between islands as well.
Again I was messing a little bit with Zibra Liquids but I haven’t gotten that to properly work with what I got because of issues I’m running with the new UE versions.
And I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff with backupping references from my idea lists since there’s been a few twitter posts/users being removed off the platform. And integrating ChatGPT to discord, I was curious to see how much it can remember so I wanted to see if it can remember the whole discord history of my main chat channel but there is a limit of 16,300 tokens if you’re using the 16k turbo version. It’s pretty cool but I am very curious for the future of AI and how much more advanced they are going to get.
As far as playing games, I stopped playing Ark with the OG boys. Yeah.. I got really annoyed and bored with it. You can see all my reasons here: Ark: Survival Evolved - UE4 (Rage quit) (Might come back for private server) but to put it simply, we went over to an official pvp server and tried that for a couple days and I just hated it. The rubberbanding, meshing in the ground, the overall dino pvp is just utter trash and annoying, and the fact that I dont want to support Wildcard Studios anymore. They are the most corrupt dev studio of it’s size in history. The amount of times they’ve fucked innocent people over and the fact that their literally scamming people with Atlas and the full price UE5 version of ark. For more context of WC being corrupt, go look up them banning people off of snail games servers. Fucking disgusting.
I tried Saints Row Reboot again.. Yeah don’t ever get it. THEY HAVE NOT CHANGED A SINGLE FUCKING THING. It still disconnects, still has infinite loading screens and they even made it so the coop partner has to wait for the host to finish the first 3 levels so they can play, even if you partied up with them from the beginning. They are just sitting their at a blank screen. Another company that I don’t trust. And I was really wanting to play coop on it since saints row is supposed to be a fun coop goofy experience. Not anymore.
So as I’m writing this I have gone back to Black Ops 4 Zombies finishing off the rest of the easter eggs. It’s still fun but that Blood of the Dead easter egg is a bitch. We finished it the other day but man was it annoying with all those steps. I mainly got stuck with the samantha says part because these youtube guides dont mention certain things or it’s wrong and had to figure it out myself even though they are supposed to be “update-to-date”.
Not that much to cover on but I’ve been mainly just want to focus on development lately so I might be a bit again on the next blog.