This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
Little one brought me a gift from Kindergarten. Kindergarten gifts are always either one or the other: A cold or a flu. So on the one hand, I was pretty much knocked out and asleep for most of the week. But on the other hand, when I wasn't acutely feeling like snot and headache, I was on my own and nobody bothered me, so I managed to crack open Unreal and poke around a little. Chiefly, I tried to see in how far Unreal's double-precision-by-default nature actually allowed me to create a larger game world without needing to rely on illusions and sleigh of hand.
Unreal offers "Landscapes", which are not just heighmaps but come with a bunch of physical and graphical bells and whistles. I made one a few months ago as a backdrop and playground, but it always looked a little ugly, with black lines and patches everywhere. I assumed that this was some z-level issue, or maybe the shaders breaking down because I made the landscape too large. As it turns out, it's the shadows, stupid. The shadows break down at large distances. So, my options are to either not use shadows at all, to enable ray-tracing and multiply the hardware footprint of my project a hundredfold, or to change the shadow settings for my landscape so that shadows look like ass up close but decently alright at a distance. I chose the latter option for now, since the landscape is extremely low-res and you shouldn't be seeing shadows up close a lot anyways.
I put a big sphere in the sky and began to move it up and scale it up. I wanted to see whether I could put a moon into the sky at real scale. I didn't get that far. At a few kilometers in size and distance, it began flickering pretty badly. A little experimentation showed that it's reflections that do this. But I'm not sure how to fix it short of disabling reflections altogether. The latter wouldn't be a deal-breaker here; I don't strictly need those reflections, but it's a little annoying that this breaks down so quickly and already requires special treatment as such modest scales.
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