Like every month, Epic released some insanely good content this month, check this out!

Exactly what I need for the compass, spellbars and more.

Just great!

The release date has been announced: May 21st

I’m going to buy one, mostly because I’ve been wanting one since the first beta device came out, but I didn’t have the computer to run it.
So I waited for like what, six years?
Now the time has come.

I’m contemplating developing Althea IV in VR, but it’s a very wild idea.
My point is that we are at the beginning of brand new technologies: VR and Raytracing. It makes sense to start a new project with new technologies.
But while Raytracing is easy with Unreal Engine, VR is quite another ballpark, so I’ll be thinking very deeply about it for the forthcoming monthes/years because nobody can tell whether VR will become standard or remain a niche market.

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!