My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[nsomnia]

Originally Posted by Chad

You know i have failed and failed at completing my indie projects as well. It's too bad we couldn't come up with something unique that we could apply our skill sets to successfully just to say we 'completed' something.

00:30 - Intro
2:00 - Start with importing the same mesh and texture
3:40 - Create the same material
4:45 - Apply material
5:20 - Making a prefab/scripting part
14:15 - Testing
14:45 - Previewing in the blueprint editor
15:05 - Conclusion Start
16:20 - Conclusion End / Final Conclusion



Heres the video I got figured out this morning if you got 10 minutes (4-14 minute mark is what your intresting in I think). Starts at minute mark with importing the same mesh and texture and creating the same material then turning it into a prefab with a script to rotate it a set amount when 'Y' is pressed. It went on a little longer than I thought but I recorded this directly after I 'figured it out' from playing around.

Let me know what you think about the general idea of Unreal, curious. I'm loving it so far and I used to argue for Unity so much. Only thing im noticing is its a little taxing on the computer, a bit slower than Unity and takes up an extra 150-200 megs of ram.

Originally Posted by Julhelm

You know, if you're going to make any serious project it's going to end up being expensive. That said, while it is nice to have such things built in from the get-go, I like that Unity forced me to learn how to write my own fragment shaders. It just gives me more control over final performance. All of the node-based editors output the same CG code anyway, but they do so using their own proprietary nodes which means it is difficult to edit or understand the code afterwards if you need to manually optimize calculations. Writing your own code makes this much easier.

I take your points and agree. I am learning C++ as I go for optimization because I heard blueprint can be up to 10x slower than straight code with complex calculations. Whats cool is you can flesh it out in Blueprint then convert that to a C++ solution to continue working on/optimize/change things. Some very neat features as I explore this more and more.

They also released the 4.7.1 minor release hotfix less than 24 hours after the 4.7 major release. (and its cool on the GitHub they have Release Candidate versions available for testing and Alpha/Beta versions available for testing, as long as your subscription is valid anyway, otherwise your stuck with the last version you downloaded.

Doing this video and figuring out the basics of the Blueprint system took longer than anticipated so I might not get as much work done today as promised but this weekend for sure expect some major updates (going to model a 1950 era sub exterior and flesh out the major structural details in every compartment and also start looking into the ocean/weather project. Will be posting updates, hope to eventually convince someone to come on board.

My biggest gripe with Unreal so far is compatibility between versions. Since they are updating versions SO fast since its such a new idea for them, and the marketplace being BRAND BRAND new... assets from the marketplace currently have to be updated for each release. For example the free assets are for the last major release 4.6.1 from a month or so ago. They havnt been updated for 4.7 released 3 days ago, although some are already updated for the 4.7.1 released a few hours ago. The marketplace is also lacking majorly for the time being. The community forums makes up for it with the amount of free stuff people are sharing as they explore the engine but its no-where near Unitys Asset Store. At all.

I just bought the new Digital Tutors course "Building an Interactive Day Night Cycle Game in Unreal Engine. I think I own every course on UE4 from the major tutor websites... just havn't started any.

Does Unity have the ability to create animations by recording physics interations in the editor play preview? What about making cinematics from within the editor is there an addon for that? Those two, especially the animations from physics simulations are some of the coolest features IMO. And Blueprint is starting to get up there.

[Julhelm]

I do know there is an asset on the asset store for cutscene creation. When I was lead technical artist on Perils of Man which also used Unity we animated the cameras within the 3d app and then exported proxy objects for these to which the camera was then attached in Unity.

When I last worked with Unreal Engine (was UE3 I think) I found it clunky and the fbx importer cumbersome. As for Blueprint, a similar tool exists for Unity called Playmaker which is also a node-based editor that allows you to make an entire game. However I think any tool that 'simplifies' programming by removing the programming itself is always going to end up limiting what you can make.

When I worked with Frostbite it had node-based editors for scripting and shader creation similar to what is available for Unreal and Unity. I think CryEngine has some equivalent function. Of all the engines I've worked with I think Unity is the most user-friendly.

[nsomnia]

I agree it is the most user-friendly and I'll code anyday vs node-based anything. But its nice for learning while I go, as long as I dont depend on it. I own playMaker but never used it really, never had a project where I thought it would help me.

Edit: I did by this course and I am excited to see if its great or sucks. http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutoria...-Unreal-Engine

[nsomnia]

Did alot of measuring tonight and starting fleshing out the other compartments here for example is the base walls for the COs & XOs staterooms as well as the officers shower and sr wardroom 2 and 4.

Edit: And cleaned up github and updated it a bit.

Edit2: The picture would help yes I know I havnt recalculated my normals yet

[Chad]

@nsomnia,

Thank you for recording and uploading the videos you've linked to. As I mentioned in the video's comments section, very helpful for me to see it step by step.

I do not have experience with node-based development, I never jumped on the Playmaker bandwagon, but I do see it's value for quickly prototyping. Perhaps when my work-load decreases in April I can afford some spare time to play with Unreal.

Thanks again,
Chad

[nsomnia]

I'll definitly pay for your subscription for you to mess around with it even if just to try it. 20$ for the chance to have someone with more experiance than me the change to maybe add something small is a bargin to me.

Will update this post later I'm filling out more of the compartment as seen above. Updated a ton of the github wiki as well.

Edit: Got the Galley/Mess/Officers Quarters compartment layout finalized. Got the ocean setup updated for Unreal 4.7 hotfix 1 so I'm gonna play with that for a while later tonight, but only for a bit I'm going to do something more constructive and start fleshing out the general exterior shape of Nautilus. I asked a submarine modeller what he would charge. 100 for the model. 300 for the .blend. Psh I'll model it myself thank you, even though thats an acceptable price its unacceptable with my current project budget. I read a good phrase. "Game development success: Time, budget, skills. You'll succeed as long as you have two, and each one changes the others"

[Chad]

Did you find some decent blue prints? I know you are familiar with TheBlueprints.com, saw one of your YouTube videos include a reference to the site.

I always get hung up on the exterior of the boat despite the least amount of time is spent outside of the hull

[nsomnia]

Originally Posted by Chad

@nsomnia
I do not have experience with node-based development, I never jumped on the Playmaker bandwagon, but I do see it's value for quickly prototyping. Perhaps when my work-load decreases in April I can afford some spare time to play with Unreal.

Its giving me weird errors when I try to add you to steam. Will attempt again later. Otherwise im nsomnia (altough my username is ssa_nsomnia if that doesntwork) and I'm now using Skype for business, username: blendertek

Got alot done on the hull will post pics in a bit!

Edit: Woke up at 4 am thats why I got the hull patched up. This photo is the raw geometry and the top one is just basic diffuse color with a smoothing modifier since there are still some wrinkles in the topology especially around the hull and where the deck bevels aft into the pressure hull. I cant texture her yet because If I change any topology then Id have to retexture that part. So I'm going to play with it when I have time to perfect it. For now though I _almost_ have a game ready Nautilus. The bow planes need doing, I just stole those ones off my U-Boat model from my old game, same with the props and their shafts I did the same. So I need to make the moveable surfaces and make then animated then I can bring it into an unreal project and start for real! Pretty high quality placeholder LOL.

I had to spend 3 hours this morning from 9-11 am answering emails and making videos for my channel so I havn't got as much done as I'd like. By this weekend v1.0 will be ready though for in-game use. When I get sick of modelling I'm going to watch UE4 videos so I can start learning more, as I said I really didn't like Unity 5 as much as I thought I would and was gonna swap back for C# but said screw it I'm alraedy a third of the way through the C++ basics book, plus Blueprinting is a replacement for scripting it "is" C# kind've. Once you learn the API (if your coding) and the few differences with UE4 its actually a real easy switch. I might make the mobile version in Unity.



Edit: I added a ton of "issues" (features needed) to the issue tracker so that we know how far we are to completion of each release. Going to add more as I think of them but got the major ones added. Alpha 0.01 is 5% complete according to it now. I wish I had team members that could assign themselves to issues

Edit2: Local hobby shop went out of business. Spent some of the game budget on "research and development"


Edit3: Getting away from the exterior and going back to finishing off some compartments. I really wanna get this into the engine but for some reason I'm hesitating. Its like the feeling driving the first time you wanna do it but its scary. And I dont know I'm having this problem, I'm not doing anything in Unity either. Probably cause im spending so much time learning C++ when I should be watching UE4 courses.

Edit4: The crews qtrs + torpedo room (Bow compartment) turned into a mess. At least I got the measurments so I'm going to redo it and build it like a house with walls and floors and then build a pressure hull around it later as a "roof" since you wont see outside of that anyway, when you exit a hatch it will load the exterior model.


I'm done for today though. 12 hours of work.

Remaining immediate goals:
a) Finish the general layout of the other compartments - Thurs/Fri
b) Start an unreal project - Fri/Sat/Sun
c) Get an explorable, driveable ghost-ship Nautilus - Next week.
d) start work on russian subs from the era
e) start work on game logic
f) start work on the game intro

[nsomnia]

I may have a team member on board! We'll see how the discussions go!

Todays goal: get the exterior model finished and animated/rigged so I can start an actual game project.