Hooray! All lights now have ray-tracing abilities natively in the engine.
I still have no idea about how people without RTX cards – or ray-tracing capable high-end cards with the next generation nVidia drivers – will render the scenes, I guess that the ray-tracing shaders will simply be ignored, time will tell.

I can’t test ray-tracing yet because I’m stuck with making a pinball game as part of my Unreal courses, which really gets on my nerves: I want to start developing my game, enough with those pathetic courses!

Anyway, back to it…

During GDC2019, Epic started a large competition where hundreds of projects were compiled to be rewarded with various prizes.

Althea III won the ‘Oldest revival project of all time‘ for being online since 2003 and being remastered with Unreal Engine 4!
All what was needed was a first published project date, which was kindly certified by Obsidian and a Development in the works proof which was certified by Christopher Murphy, Unreal Evangelist, of whom I have been a student since I started working with UE4 last month.

Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.
First off, the project has to come to fruition within 3 years to be eligible, which is April 1st 2022, so it’s going to be a race!
Second off, the project needs to feature ‘classic’ characteristics, which means insanely hardcore rules, years-long progression and generally crazy frustrating game mechanics – which is part of a larger plan I’m not allowed to disclose at this time being.
Third off, I need to hire at least 5 other Epic certified developers to the team – paid by Epic on the 1M $ prize so it’s fine by me – which isn’t going to be easy to find in Belgium.

This is going to be HUGE!

Had  some trouble today with the site and deleted everything from the NAS thinking it was at fault.
In fact, it was my router – probably running its last legs.

Anyway, it was a great opportunity to clean things up, I jettisoned everything, reinstalled fresh software, only WordPress and MariaDB10, not bothering with phpMyAdmin anymore and all is well, faster than before.
I also cleaned the WordPress modules I do not use, I didn’t even remember what some of them were doing.

And finally, I removed completely my WordPress site on wordpress.com, it was useless anyway since plugins are not allowed on free accounts.

Shadow is the company’s name.
What they propose is basically streaming a gaming session: the game you’re playing runs on a remote Shadow machine and is rendered on your PC, phone, tablet or TV through their proprietary software; you don’t need a powerful PC anymore, all you need is a decent internet connection and you’re good to go.

But Shadow is already a thing of the past before being a thing of the future – phew! progress goes faster and faster!
Nvidia and AMD are teaming up with small family businesses like LG and Google to bring the whole concept to a new level.
By the looks of it – be warned, strong Scottish accent, pretty funny actually – we will now be able, when watching let’s say a trailer on Youtube about the latest Assassin’s Creed, to click on a button on the screen and be immediately playing the game in our own session!

Google is first on the list because they already have hundreds of data centers all over the world, own submarine cables and an infrastructure which makes Terminator’s Skynet look like a child toy.

Regardless of who’s going to make it first: it’s coming.
Watch your PC closely, it might be the last you ever buy.

I’m out of words, so pardon my French.

I’m in the 17th lesson – over 85 – in my current Udemy UE4 course and I – literally – don’t know whether to go cry in a corner and beg for mercy or burst into frantic joy laughter – like maniacally.

Unreal is insane – no pun intended. Everything is possible, every single mesh, texture, effect, whatever, can be created, manipulated, modified in real time, there is a solution to each and every problem, I’m flabbergasted with the endless possibilities.

What the hell is he on? might you ask. Well, let me give you an example.
In NWN, there are standard animations. For example, when you’re designing a chest, you have to provide the open and close animations in the model. Not in UE4. You just import the mesh, and that’s it. Upon importing the mesh into the engine, you then can add a timeline to any action on the chest to open it over how many seconds you want, at the speed you want and even with the speed variations you want and it can even be different according to your class, the quest you’re on or any parameter you might think of!

Even texture materials can be modified in real time.
Well, in a nutshell: anything!

The course I’m following is very well structured, I encounter very few problems, I understand everything the instructor is explaining, but the problem is: will I remember all of that when the time will come to put everything to work in Althea 3?

A part of me says: ‘Forget it, way too complicated, even the instructor messes things up at times!’ – which is true – and another part whispers: ‘Dude, this is the time of your life, materialize your dreams, you can make it!’

To be completely honest, this is insane, I have to assimilate in a few weeks what would usually take years of learning-practicing.

– ‘You won’t make it’
– ‘Yes, I will’
– ‘Nah, you won’t’
– ‘Shut up! I will’
– ‘Awkey, if you say so’. Turns around giggling.

Erm… shall I, really?