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.

I encountered a nasty bug last week: I was unable to extrude a BSP – those basic UE4 meshes used to prototype levels.

I still could select faces but it’s like they were inactive, I couldn’t move them and, of course, extrude them. All was fine with edges and vertices and the problem concerned only a single project, all others were fine.
So I thought I had toggled a preference inadvertently and replaced my projects settings with those of another project, to no avail.

I submitted my problem on various UE4 discord channels and even on the official UE4 boards, no one ever answered my question.
Disheartening and, to be honest, I was losing confidence in the tool: I don’t want to live through the bugs I had to face in NWN ever again, my own bugs and more than enough to deal with.

I finally found the problem by myself: there are 2 different config folders in an UE4 project, one at the project root and another hidden somewhere deep inside the structure. Very, very, very poor programming if you ask me.
I started a new project, moved my files in it and the problem was gone.

But my confidence was gone too.

I’m starting to work again this morning, I’ll see how things pan out.

It has been one year since the new development began.
Althea 1 started in 2002. Althea 2, based on NWN2, started in 2006 or so, can’t remember exactly, and Althea 3 started on April 23rd 2018.
So I guess it’s fair to call this development phase Althea IV, which is fine by me, it goes quite nicely with the Quadracle lore.

Anyway, it has been a lot of work and there is still a lot to do, I can only hope the project will come to fruition.

I’m now at 69% of the first Unreal Engine 4 course, the plan hasn’t changed: get where I was with NWN Aurora by the end of 2019.
If I make it through to that objective, Althea IV will be gorgeous!

Peut être reconstruit.

Pensées à nos amis Français.

Ok, I’m at 52% of my first UE4 course and just finished the pinball game.
Interesting course, but boring and badly structured, that Chris dude Unreal Evangelist is a nice guy and knows the software very well but is a very poor teacher – and his mind is a mess.
I’m finally starting a project which can serve as foundation for Althea III: a survival.

There is still a long way to go to be able to produce content like I was doing on NWN though, I don’t feel confident in everything I learnt so far and don’t think I can start a project on my own anytime soon.

After this course, I’ll be beginning the C++ UE4 course which is much longer but, allegedly, better structured. And after that I have a few other shorter courses about multiplayer implementation, content importing, material designing, monster AI and various technical aspects.

My goal is to get by the end of this year where I was with NWN. Once I have the foundations built, it will always be the same stuff: design levels, conversations, quests, enigmas, items, particle effects, models, characters, monsters, all things that UE4 handles much better than NWN.

The next step, if next step there is because I’m pushing myself to the limit here and might throw the towel any moment, will probably be to put the project on Kickstarter with a Stadia publishing in mind, which means no-one will ever need to buy the game nor connect to any server: just get on Youtube and click Play on the game demo.
No need to download hakpaks nor the game: the players will play from any device they want including their TV set like they would stream any video content. Buying a gaming controller might be needed in case of a TV, of course.

We are at a new dawn of computer gaming.
I’m developing the game with ray-tracing enabled, which will not render on older computers, but would render perfectly if game-streaming!
Being able to access Kickstarter and Stadia means game developers don’t need to find a publisher anymore. And don’t need to give those sharks an arm and a leg, I know what I’m talking about from my novels publishers: on 13€ for a sold book I only received 1€ and everybody thinks it’s fine. Screw the leechers!