Compared to Neverwinter Night’s Aurora, designing a map under UE4 is incredibly hard. Dominique and I have been planning the city, sketching the layout on paper, sculpting the landscape to place the river, the central hill, the palace, the cathedral, the industrial district, the various neighborhoods, Emer’s tower, the cemetery, the bridge, the walls, the marketplaces and much more, but there is a long way from envisioning a city and actually laying down all the elements in a pretty, realistic and playable way. A very long way!

Fortunately, UE4 is a blast, it’s unbelievably complex and, at the same time, powerful.
Everything is coming along nicely and in a few days, or weeks, I have no clue at this point, it could be months, we’ll have a stunning photo-realistic medieval city as a starting point for our adventures. I already own many UE4 packages but still have to design lots of objects, including all the cathedral elements, I got nothing at the moment and will have to start from scratch. That will be cool though, it’s only a lot of work.

Development will go faster and faster.
I spent hundreds of hours learning the ropes of UE4, now it’s time to put all of that to good use. The beginnings are tedious but the more I’ll be using the tool, the more confident I will grow and the faster I’ll design the game.

I now have a pretty decent knowledge about pretty much every technical aspect of development except characters.
My knowledge encompasses dozens of expertise areas from simple mesh design up to programming pretty much any functionality I want, but characters and armor are still a big question mark. I know how to sculpt a creature, but fear it will be ugly, I can texture it, and again fear it will look like a sack of shit, I can rig it, and fear the rig will not work properly, I can animate it, but fear the animations will suck and, most importantly, I dread the moment I will have to string all the pieces together.
Anyway, that’s not for this year for sure, so my goal is to get the most beautiful city I can dream of and go on from there.

Enough said.

I’m now setting up the first dialog, using Unreal’s behavior tree, which I have yet to discover. Some people like it, others hate it, at first glance it looks like an intuitive decision tree which could be used for conversations as well as AI.

This is going on the slow side of things though, I’m on holiday and spend some time on WoW with the family.

I must confess I’ve been hit pretty hard on the head as of late, animations are a can of worms!
I thought I just had to put bones into my mesh to create the armature – or skeleton, or rig, all the same – and use any kind of pose editor to define all my poses, idle, running, attacking, dodging and so on.

Not so fast, young Padawan!
The easiest way to build a rig is to connect all the bones of an armature, which works fine but each bone has to be moved individually to create any pose.
That’s why IK – inverse kinematics – was invented which, in a nutshell, is a way to tell which bones move in conjunction with others.
It’s a fantastic technique, once an IK rig is correctly built, moving any part of the rig will move all other parts in a natural way.

The bad part is that I have – once more – to learn a new job to get all of this working.
The good part is that, as far as I can tell, animation is the last piece of the puzzle and once I am able to sculpt, texture, rig and animate a creature, I will have all the techniques needed to start building content.

Many pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.
I managed to build a server and clients – while I still don’t know how to connect the clients to the server, but that’s true for everything I learn: there are more wholes left than in a Swiss cheese! -, I can make a character move, I learned most of what I need about using blueprints, I have ideas about the map, the spellbook, the effects, the materials and tons of other stuff but there is one thing that freaks me out: animation!

I want to build my first chest, to test materials so I don’t have to texture most objects, just use materials, and I also want to test interaction between the character and the chest: point and click and move to the chest which opens when close enough or use the modern approach: move up to the chest and press E when close enough. I still have to decide.

Whatever, I need to animate the opening and closing of the chest and for that there are 2 techniques: build a blueprint in UE4 and apply rotators to the lid of the chest on a timetable, or rig a chest in Blender the same way characters are rigged: with armatures, basically bones to which are attached vertices and which move following animation patterns that can be exported to UE4 and connected one to the other with a state machine, more on that later.

I can animate the chest fine using rotators but I thought now is a good time to learn object/character rigging so I’m back in Blender 2.8 learning the whole process of armature creation and weight painting.

This probably is the hardest thing in the whole project, everything is going nicely at the moment, to a point I can see the whole project coming to fruition, but I have to overcome animation difficulties. Animator is a job by itself, yet another job I have to learn, and it’s a hard one.