slaen
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Town gates and memory management
🕑 Added 2020-06-24 01:23:58 +0000 UTCThe starting town will finally have some proper gates. The gates will be closing at sunset and won't open again until dawn. Anyone wanting to enter or exit the town will need to find some other alternative or wait until the sun comes up.
The current gameplay direction I want to test out is making the nights outside of town a bit more dangerous to the player. At first this will mean stronger and more frequent hostile encounters at night. If things go well and the gameplay is fun then I'm thinking about adding night specific NPCs like vampires and werewolves and possibly even have special events based on something like the lunar cycle. If anyone has played Terraria and remembers the Blood Moon events that's roughly the direction I'm thinking of.
This also brings up an issue with using the wait command in game. If the player can wait in order to advance time anywhere and at any time then the gates being closed at night really doesn't have the same impact. I'm thinking that I'll hook waiting to specific pieces of furniture. So if the player wanted to wait for any period of time they would need to find a chair, bench, or bed. That way getting stuck outside of town after sunset should feel a bit more dangerous to the player. This isn't set in stone just yet but I'll probably put it in the next build for testing unless anyone has any objections or alternative ideas?
Also on a side note, for anyone that's working on their own games in UE4 or thinking about doing so. I recently watched this video from Epic Games about soft object references and memory management and really learned a lot of useful stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ENnLV19Cw
This was why the goblin alchemist's references would randomly break during her quest chain. I'm working on fixing that now and changing over some things in the parent character class to save on memory in the future.
Still chipping away on the map updates, the AI revamp, and the rest of the game loop system designs. Nothing fancy to take screenshots of just yet though.
Comments
ChipsMan666
I think it's a very good idea !
slaen
It's funny my professional background is all on the 3d art side of things, primarily character art, and so much of memory management reminds me of when I was trying to figure out normal maps for the first time. So, there's a lot for me to learn. And I figured if I can highlight some stuff that helped me for other people then that's an added bonus. Not sure about RTX just yet. My lighting skills are pretty weak at the moment and I haven't really had time to level them up. The raytracing stuff looks really cool though. Any idea how expensive it is? or is it easy to set up something in the options menu to easily toggle it on and off for players? Are there any decent tutorials out there for it? I thought it was mostly used for visdev / architectural render type stuff?
Artem
Are you planing to add optional RTX to your game?) I think it's quite easy now to tweak it in UE4. Most people will probably not use it, but if it raises you max possible graphics quality, it should be great to promote your game.
Artem
Cool, thanks for the link. Game engines move towards dynamic load/unload objects and textures instead of separating them into levels for quite a bit already. I think it's related to how fast hard drives (SSD actually) and memory became these days.
