The full text can be read here, but it’s not really worth reading to be honest, no details are unveiled yet, we only know we won’t be having a new patch for months, until they are done with the 64bit binaries, console controls and the new renderer.

It’s likely the new renderer will be able to use more texture maps, maybe PBR materials, but I don’t think they are going to touch the engine which will leave us with flat 360/360 meters maps.
And quite frankly, it doesn’t cut it.

I was very vocal about how graphics don’t matter and only content/gameplay is important, but I was wrong: people just don’t play old games for more than a few hours of nostalgia. Usually; they are always exceptions or course, but it’s not worth it developing on an old engine, in my opinion.

I started programming computers in 1981.
At that time, not only was it possible to master all existing software but also to write your own and even build a computer by yourself, building the PCB following your own design and buying the components, including the CPU, from your local electronics shop. The most expensive CPU was around the equivalent of 50€ back then, compared to the 500€+ of a 9900k today.

35 years later, there is nothing left of that era.
Even the simplest of all software, word processing, is now so complex that many students fail at formatting their papers properly and don’t even know how to make an automatic table of contents. I have written five novels so far and only used a handful of the functionalities modern word processing software feature.

When it comes to game engines, they are so complex that even the company employees barely know the parts they are not working on.
Unreal Engine sports hundreds of functions, each with up to 20 parameters, on top of a hundreds of functions rich API.
Building the lighting of a scene, for example, is, depending on the way you look a it, a miracle or a nightmare. Position the lights, chose their type, their dynamics, even their texture! then when everything is ready, build the HDR environment, the directional light, the light mass, the light portals, the reflection boxes, the skylight if applicable and finally post-process the crap out of it with close to one hundred parameters.
Yikes!
Then you have to bake everything in, which takes 100% power of any CPU you’re using – explaining why I’ll be buying a Ryzen 3850X as soon as it comes out for its 16/32 cores/threads.

But hey! I can design absolutely lovely scenes already and when thinking about what Martouf’s shop will look kike, I can’t help but drooling!

I stopped following the Virtus free UE4 Youtbube courses. Way too many shortcuts, mistakes, confusion and bad taste. And his expresion skills are poor, which annoys me.
So I bit the bullet and bought Udemy courses.

The first course is 60 hours long over 340 videos and teaches how to use Microsoft Visual Studio C++ with UE4, with 3 simple games being built along the course.
The second one is 15.5 hours long over 85 videos and is about developing games with blueprints including all aspects, levels, materials, animations, lighting, post-processing, menus, HUD, physics and so on.

I started with the C++ course, it was pretty fine, until I noticed the whole course is undergoing a full review, at which point I stopped, asked the instructor whether it was worth continuing before he had finished and proceeded with the second course.
I was then on the verge of cancelling the whole stuff and asking for a refund: on the first lesson, the ‘Unreal Evangelist’ as they call those UE gurus was using some starter content that was nowhere to be found.
The dude said at the beginning of the video: ‘make sure you have downloaded the assets’ but never explained where the frack the download was!
One hour of frustration later I finally found the tiny folder button in the videos list and could download the assets but I was already pretty disgruntled.

I calmed down and proceeded with the videos and must say it’s of incredibly high quality. I’m learning tons of stuff in no time, it’s unbelievable and, for the first time: fun.
Unfortunately, the instructor has not an ounce of pedagogy. His American is, well, below average American, which speaks volumes, he doesn’t explain correctly some key steps in his course and is generally messy. He knows UE very well though and while infuriating at times, the course is exactly what I need to progress.
So I have no other choice but to hang on and pray for the best!

Wellcome home!

In Blender, rendering a complex scene I designed for my son went from 104 to 40 seconds. In World of Tanks, I went from 70 fps to above 200. That’s what I call an upgrade from my trustworthy GTX960!
And I didn’t even overclock the thing, there’s more to get from the card if it ever becomes necessary.

Now, why did I buy an RTX card while no game uses that technology besides Battlefield V and everybody says it is not worth the money?
Unreal Engine supports Nvidia with this technology and I thought I couldn’t afford to pass on what could be the next graphics revolution at the beginning of a development cycle, Althea 3 being scheduled for er… quite some time if I only ever manage to get the ball rolling for so long!

I could have bought a 2060 RTX card though, cheaper, but the 2060 only sports 6Go RAM while the 2070 and 2080 have 8Go. It doesn’t look much, but with all the rage in shader development I didn’t want the card to bottleneck because of the onboard RAM and some current games use up to 6 gigs already.

So I ordered a Gigabyte Gaming Z 2070 RTX from Amazon France for 420€: it was such a bargain!
In fact, it wasn’t a bargain, it was a scam, my ordered got cancelled and I had to wait a whole week to get my money back: never ever buy expensive stuff from the Amazon marketplace!
So, I was about to buy a 2060 because the 550€+ that 2070s cost are a bit much when I went and browsed Amazon Deutschland and saw they had this KFA2 card at 499€.
I bought it immediately, considering a decent 2060 is 390€ it was quite a price hike but I thought it was worth it for 15% performance increase, 33% more RAM and – which is important when working with graphics software – 2304 CUDA cores instead of 1920.

The day after I bought it, the card was listing for 590€, the RTX cards prices are all over the place, it’s insane at the moment.

The card is huge, it takes 3 slots in my tower and barely fits in my ATX case, but the installation was smooth as silk and I even have nice RGB lighting, all is well!

Want to know what the frack that is?

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