From now on I’ll keep the devlogs bi-weekly. There are many uninteresting things that aren’t worth showing, and also a lot of behind the curtains work that I won’t show. Things like story writing, experiments, networking, research, courses, paperwork…etc.
This devlog is fairly short, here’s a summary
Robot Model Low Poly + Texture
This took the majority of a week to finish. There were so many pieces, and my computer started to struggle a little bit (who knew 38 Million polygons would do such thing. No one could have possibly foreseen this!). I optimized the model to 68K triangles, which I feel is still a bit high for NPCs, but it’s easy to lower it down later, and it will be the same base for the main player as well.
I had to split the model into many pieces to help with the baking process, I ended up with 66 pairs (highpoly and lowpoly). I did not want to spend like 10 minutes manually renaming them, so instead I spent 30 minutes creating a script that does it for me. All I had is to select a highpoly and lowpoly pair then run the script and it will make the names match and add a “_low” and “_high” suffix, then temporarily hide them. This made the process super fast and straightforward
Initially I was going to rename the highpoly meshes (“head”, “neck_joint_1″…etc for example) and have the script transfer it and add the suffixes, but then I realized I didn’t even have to do that, the resulting objects will have matching names regardless. So now all my objects are still called “Circle.xxx_high” The naming might be cursed, but it does the job, and they will be all merged in the end anyway.
Anyway, crimes against the craft aside, here are more renders of the textured model
Bug Fix
I fixed a bug with the “look at” function. Previously, when you were running with the camera looking behind you, the character looked down instead of forward. The fix is simple : just force the Z location of “look at target” (yellow dot) to a specific height when the camera is looking back. 2.5-3m high seems to work well.
Game Optimization Course
Tom Looman released Complete Game Optimization for Unreal Engine 5 . I previously got his C++ course and was very satisfied with it, and this was a no brainer despite the price. I followed the first few chapters and I already learned a few tricks.
One of the main things I did, deviating from the course, is using RenderDoc and Nvidia Nsight to profile rendering. I tried it with some builds of my game, as well as Elden Ring, Okami, Fallout3, GTA V and Assetto Corsa Competizione. They were quick experiments, just to try and make sense of the rendering process and familiarize myself more with the tools.
Misc
Some other stuff I did:
- Paperwork and legal document stuff
- Networking
- Cleaned up and updated some Blender Addons
- Story Writing
- Tested Marmoset Toolbag 5
- Learne a bit about rigging and animation
That’s all for this devlog. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you soon!