Unreal Engine Side Project: Pt0

[youngneil1]

Streaming pause down to 8 to 12 seconds, every 10 minutes of gameplay (or so ). This is not classic level loading, but just streaming in more stuff in far distance, updating shadows more nearby and forgetting stuff in the opposite far distance. Load game time for inital spawn is about 25 secs.

There is a toal of 1311 sublevels (1km*1km*1km) visible at any time on screen. They are sorted in a big cube pattern of 11x11x11 chunks (11km * 11 *km * 11km), with the player always at the middle of the bigcube (after streaming and level shifting). View range is therefore 5.5 km in every direction, including up and down.

The 11km*11km*11km big cube is itself on a tiny fraction of the whole game world, which consists actually of about 10.000*10.000*2 = 200 Mio. of these big cubes. The position of each sublevel in this superstructure is used for filling it procedurally (seed based) with content.

Each sublevel (1*1*1) holds 512 actors (which is quite sparse, so many actors will be scaled rather big for floors, high walls and connections to neighbouring sublevels).

Full shadow detail in about 2.0 km around player. Afterwards HISM instead of full actors (exchanged with full actors during streaming).

Frame rate at 1440p is between 50 to 70 FPS on an AMD 3900 with a 3080 RTX card, raytracing all on (inlcuding GI, Shadows, Reflections and AO, just without transluceny).

This is the framework in which I will now try to hammer more details in, let's see ...

[slowdive]

That's a great FPS for the number of actors and full raytracing. Now the fun begins, right? Bring on the star destroyers.

[youngneil1]

Yep, the fun is about to begin indeed ! I will need your math skills for geometries in sublevels later on, so get ready for my stupid questions . When a few basic geometries work, I will add a first enemy type (I got a little UFO from a unreal marketplaceplace AI apackage running already). This will increase fun again, for sure .

This video here is a bit longer and explains inter alia where the project might be headed when it comes to multiplayer:

https://youtu.be/9a5zhA5QsAA

[youngneil1]

Video up now, had forgtotten actually publish it .

[youngneil1]

A HISMSpawner (on foreach sublevel) has three random streams set up (x,y,z) which are seeded with x,y and z grid positions of this sublevel in the surperstructure respectively (ranging from 0 to 200.000.000). We need three streams because of the int size limit and the size of the superstructure.

These streams are reset when the HISMSpawner spawns its content anew, ie exchanges HSIM against actors and vice versa (or is destroyed and recreated, but this happens anyway then). Combined random rolls against all the three used for determinig each state: like eg draw 0 to 33 from x,y, z stream respectively, add togetther and compare with the required roll height for determining state.

In order to have sublevels form a greater, cohesive whole each level (20x20x20 sublevels) will get its own stream, seeded with the combined level gridx,y of the level in the superstruture (ranging from 1 to 10.000 for x,y; forming a unique seed number like 99989997 for x9998 and y9997.

As the player will see from level to level, we will need to have 9 streams for levels (cube around player) active all the time. The 9 streams get stored on player character for now. Once the player enters a new level, the group of stroed seeds will be updated (some added new, some forgotten).

The level seeds are used to generate region information in the respective level, which will group clusters of sublevels and have them have a fitting type and spatial position to form landscape elements than span more than one sublevel, like mabe a 4.000m high mountain range. The sublevel connection will also defined for the level.

The outermost sublevels of each level are special case sublevels as they need to to have a good chance to allow a transition to the outer most sublevels of the respective neighbouring level.

There will also be loot and spawn enemy tables that are influenced by the danger level of a sublevel (which depends on distance to centr of the superstructure). Same goes for environmental hazards (like maybe gas clouds, energy draining fields, movement slowing fields, low visisbilty fields, only 2 or even 1 sun level, etc.).

Seals can be used to block ways to loot (with keys to open seals being carried eg by special enemies). Seals will also block level to level transition, requiring to find at least one specific key in the level to progress out of it.

Btw, I wonder if we could have some kind of abstract weather, using particle effects.

[slowdive]

latest video is great with all the mirroring and the streaming in new content is not too long. Maybe having a message of "Loading..." with some spinner or slowly adding more periods after "Loading....." will let the user know that the game hasn't froze. The multiplayer features and trading/selling paths sound like fun too... a whole year to make it to the center, wow

[youngneil1]

Hey dear IBlers,

I have dropped out again for much too long. I am very sorry for that. I always feel a bit of guilt when looking at the forum because I have yet not closed this cycle (as in led IB to a point where I think it will be able to float on its own). I know this is unwarranted and you guys are really great and releaxed, so I am just silly (but cannot help it from time to time ).

I have not the mental capacity and time in real life to support two game development projects at the same time unfortunately. And right now I am more into the Unreal project here. But then again this can change - and also both projects are very different in nature (and reflect my different preferences when it comes to games). The difference between the projects in a good thing because the Pt0 (Unreal) is in no way a replacement for IB. It just scratches a different itch for me.

So, how is Pt0 doing? At least I was not lazy in this regard. To be realistic it will be hard to push through with this over-the-top idea, so in all likelyhood this is more a training ground for me when it comes to learning the Unreal Engine (and generally improving in game design, which at the very end might feed even back to IB as diffent as it is).

Enough words, time for pictures :

Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYLnF6iAkVw

Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-YLYxlDCec

[Dorateen]

Those look like some neat effects, youngneil1

[slowdive]

Loving the atmosphere! The music and sound effects really add a lot to the overall feel of the dark and eerie world... and the rain too! I like the thrown blocks adding stepping stones to walls in order to move around the procedurally generated world when needed. I also like the "built-in" UI elements of health and flying timer. The critters are scary and creepy, but cool too. I thought the sound effect was great for the laser like projectiles. Was a cool 80s/90s gaming type sound effect. You do a great job narrating the videos and it is great to hear your voice

[Pongo]

Impressive stuff! Interesting aesthetics as well - the spider robot things are nicely done. Look forward to seeing where you take it.