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!

Working my way through the teaching videos, nearly finished the pinball tutorial, soon to begin the survival tutorial which is more of what we need for Althea.

I understand the courses perfectly, my only fear is not to remember of everything when I’ll need it: it’s so complex, so many things!

But it’s great, love it, it takes time, if I manage to string everything up, it will be great!

For your eyes pleasure, what can be achieved on consumer grade hardware today with UE4.

Hooray! All lights now have ray-tracing abilities natively in the engine.
I still have no idea about how people without RTX cards – or ray-tracing capable high-end cards with the next generation nVidia drivers – will render the scenes, I guess that the ray-tracing shaders will simply be ignored, time will tell.

I can’t test ray-tracing yet because I’m stuck with making a pinball game as part of my Unreal courses, which really gets on my nerves: I want to start developing my game, enough with those pathetic courses!

Anyway, back to it…