Wonder what the hell that means?
So do I.

That’s Unreal Engine my friend, the must in obfuscated modern nerdware™.
It’s quite new to me. Having learned difficult concepts over the years – like multi-dimensional matrix calculations or nuclear reaction equations – I either understood or didn’t.
Here, it’s more complicated: I understand what I learn, but it’s useless to understand since I will not be able to remember what I have learned when I will need it to build my own project: there are way too many functions doing way too many things. The UE4 API is so complex that if you Google ‘Unreal functions count’ or anything close to it, you won’t get any link. Not a single one. There are thousands of functions and truckloads are added every year.

Basically, the course answers questions that I don’t ask myself. So, I’m parroting what the instructor shows and will use whatever material I find over the internet as foundation for Althea IV but it would take years to know what each function does and being able to remember the name of a function you need when you need it.

By the way, ‘Get Hit Result under Cursor by Channel’ is used to determine what is under the mouse pointer at any moment to take appropriate actions, highlight an object, display a tooltip, display a health bar, stuff like that.
What an insightful name for a function, isn’t it?

I’m now at 78% of the first course, still going strong.
But grumbling every day, that’s for sure!
Damn IT nerds, I fart in their general direction!

Thinking about everything the project needs, mounts and water spring to mind.

Like every month, Epic released some insanely good content this month, check this out!

Exactly what I need for the compass, spellbars and more.

Just great!

The release date has been announced: May 21st

I’m going to buy one, mostly because I’ve been wanting one since the first beta device came out, but I didn’t have the computer to run it.
So I waited for like what, six years?
Now the time has come.

I’m contemplating developing Althea IV in VR, but it’s a very wild idea.
My point is that we are at the beginning of brand new technologies: VR and Raytracing. It makes sense to start a new project with new technologies.
But while Raytracing is easy with Unreal Engine, VR is quite another ballpark, so I’ll be thinking very deeply about it for the forthcoming monthes/years because nobody can tell whether VR will become standard or remain a niche market.

I’m crawling through the Survival tutorial which I will be finishing regardless of it’s poor quality.
Some great stuff in there, but I wish the teacher would get his priorities sorted.
For example, we are taught how to change the shadow colors – who the hell cares, seriously! – but not a word about creating water.
I guess water is simply a BSP with water texture, but anyway it’s so basic, how can he not say a word about it?
He covers an incredible number of useless options – the post-processing volume alone has like 200 options or so – but at this point I would be totally unable to create basic levels from scratch.

So, I started making a word processing document where I take note of everything I see which might be useful in the future, because remembering everything is downright impossible.

I can only wish the next course – which is in C++ and consists of 600 videos or so… – is better structured.
It’s ok, I’m making my way through, but boy! so much time wasted, I wish I had a ‘to the point’ course instead of that horrible mess.

The maps I’m creating at the moment are gorgeous though, I’ll be publishing some screenshots when I have something worth showing because everything looks photorealistic, UE4 is pretty much movie quality, it’s stunning.