It’s way too boring, the sooner it gets done, the better.

After having translated all code, already 500 text resources have been translated on a total of 4000. It’s reasonable to assume I can translate 300 a day, so this will take roughly two weeks.

When all of that is done, only the last few 2DAs will be left and we’ll be done!

I incidentally found that Google Translate is a very valuable tool!
Especially when it comes to translate books or long descriptions, it’s easy to have Google Translate do the job, paste it back to althea.tlk and just correct the few mistakes left. It’s really fast and I’ll be using it extensively.

My learning of UE4 goes on nicely, it’s an incredibly powerful tool which will take quite some time to master but the pieces are slowly falling into place, I start to get the big picture and do quite interesting things at the moment.

The very good side of this Althea on UE4 project is that I have control over absolutely everything. At times, I want to drop the ball thinking it’s way too much to tackle but I hang on and start to see how the workflow could be more efficient than with the NWN Infinity engine. I honestly don’t know where all of this is leading, I’m thinking about hiring people to work with me, or join a team, all opportunities are on the table, but it’s still way too early to tell whether the project will come to fruition or not.

My head hurts.
I spent the whole day toying with character animations in UE4, following insightful tutorials which are nice but don’t explain much of the rationale behind the steps involved.
Funny enough, I’m now at the 6th episode, which 48k people have watched, while 52k, 86k, 74k, 109k and 188k people respectively watched the 5th, 4th, 3re, 2nd and 1st episodes!
The less views is for episode 47 with 7k views…

Anyway, state machines, and especially blend spaces were the main topic of the day. A state machine is a central point for all actions of a character and animations associated with them. The blend space is presenting a graphical interface where all animations for a character blend. In other words, what happens if a character goes from idle to running full speed and then suddenly crouching or jumping in the air. All animations – and a typical character can have dozens of animations – need to blend nicely so all movements look natural regardless of what are the former and next animations are.

So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I will recall most of what I’m doing without really understanding what’s going on. It should be exciting but it’s mostly frightening and not so fun. I remember from 15 years ago unboxing the Aurora toolset, building my first map – it was a tavern – and putting a table, some chairs, a fireplace sound and a bartender in the scene. All was pretty straightforward, well explained and, well, let’s be honest, easy and exciting.

Unreal Engine 4 is not easy.
Like, at all.
It’s a gigantic puzzle with no apparent order, cumbersome and confused.
I’m still keeping at it at the moment hoping those efforts will pay down the road but either I became dumber and dumber over the years or the newer generations are full of geniuses.
Of which I doubt for some reasons.

I’m in the process of translating all the text resources, which includes scripts, zones, items, conversations, 2DAs and son on. Thousands of lines to translate, it’s really a pain but it needs to be done before the game goes console if an influx of new players happened – doubtful, but who knows!

When I’m done with translation, I’ll be revamping some parts of crafting. Alchemy will be completely new, e.g. tons of new potions and new effects. Enchanting will be revamped too to keep players’ power in check instead of the glorious mess we have now especially with players happily exploiting the stupid D&D rules and cherry-picking their classes to get the most bang for the buck.

Well, while I’m talking about cheaters, it’s one of the main reasons which led me to go the Unreal Engine route: use my own ruleset and not have to fight against the 40 years old D&D rules which were already subpar for pen and paper but really suck donkey balls in a video game.

Whatever, one of the many problems of UE4 is the lack of consistency between versions, I stumble across as many bugs as with NWN, which speaks volumes!
But I’ll get there eventually, I’m in the process of building a Witcher like game after which I’ll have to add multiplayer to it and, well, come up with full a fully featured product, which will take years. Reason why Althea will be alive forever and will keep on improving and growing especially if the shaders/renderer upgrade lives up to the promise.

The French community is too small for me to go on developing the module in a single language, it just isn’t worth the effort.

The French boards will remain open, just to keep in touch, but from now on all development, which includes conversations and item names will be in English.

I will be translating everything over time with my wife’s help but any further development will be in English only.