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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I added switching between weapons, which ended up being a bit more work than expected. I had to rearrange some data buffers, because it turned out some stuff I'm passing to the material shader isn't useful, and other things that I don't need aren't being passed. I'm also considering switching the projectile collision model from circle-circle to circle-AABB, as this will allow me some flexibility of projectile shapes, and hacks for high-velocity projectiles passing through an enemy in a single frame (just make a long rectangle, lol).
I also played around with some benchmarks. Fired off my old desktop to see how the game performs there, and it was interesting. It seems to be free of the issues plaguing my new laptop like overheating, and the sudden choppiness when I do GPU-CPU copies of the background texture, but since it's pretty old hardware, the total amount of monsters it can handle at 60 FPS is actually lower. Still, I think I'll start recording the dev journal videos from there, as I seem to be able to get better recording framerate and quality out of it.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Wrote even more design documentation. It's a purpose unto itself.
Other than that, I spend quite a few hours trying to blender together a humanoid character, but ended up getting frustrated with my inability to make Blender do what I had in mind. So I did some thinking. Would it be possible to construct character meshes procedurally in Unreal Engine, for which I already have the technique down and only ("only", he says!) need to write up the exact specifications for the character? And then animate the product thereof manually? My LLM Copilot says yes, and as far as I can judge it sounds credible.
Now all I need is time and concentration. Hard to come by lately.
By generate procedurally, do you mean use unreal's tools like metahuman and just export a model? Or like, write code to build you a model? If the former, yeah, I would definitely recommend using some sort of preexisting humanoid avatar model that has all your blend shapes and replacement slots configured, then just building from that base. Building new dedicated humanoid characters is really an activity for people doing very art-driven projects with particular aesthetics. I personally work in Unity, so I just import UMA and that gives me good default humanoids out of the box that I can always replace with custom models later.
Write code to build me a model. I've already built myself a small toolkit for building procedural meshes, and I have more code from older projects that I could port over or take as inspiration for expanding those tools. The main challenge as far as that goes is that I'm not kitbashing together subdivided primitives, or building fairly simple mechanical shapes, but trying to sew together a full humanoid, give or take a few simplifications. That's obviously quantitatively more work, but there's also more to take into account aesthetically. Beyond that, I've never done any rigging or animating, so that's just entirely new.
I built a first prototype of my build-procedurally-and-edit-in-unreal pipeline, and it didn't work out. Mostly because I failed to consider various details - like whether I can accept having uniform proportions on all characters, for example. I'm putting the whole animation business on the backburner for a bit while I sort out my priorities on that one.
And since I haven't accomplished anything visible in too long, I've started doing a little UI work instead. Just be able to see some results at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link