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…

During GDC2019, Epic started a large competition where hundreds of projects were compiled to be rewarded with various prizes.

Althea III won the ‘Oldest revival project of all time‘ for being online since 2003 and being remastered with Unreal Engine 4!
All what was needed was a first published project date, which was kindly certified by Obsidian and a Development in the works proof which was certified by Christopher Murphy, Unreal Evangelist, of whom I have been a student since I started working with UE4 last month.

Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.
First off, the project has to come to fruition within 3 years to be eligible, which is April 1st 2022, so it’s going to be a race!
Second off, the project needs to feature ‘classic’ characteristics, which means insanely hardcore rules, years-long progression and generally crazy frustrating game mechanics – which is part of a larger plan I’m not allowed to disclose at this time being.
Third off, I need to hire at least 5 other Epic certified developers to the team – paid by Epic on the 1M $ prize so it’s fine by me – which isn’t going to be easy to find in Belgium.

This is going to be HUGE!