Update 0.54

major update

AreaZ Demo · published 2 years ago

Hi,

it has been a long time. Finally I have managed to get a stable game build on Unreal Engine 5.3.

This works quite nice and will provide sound platform for future development, while providing us new long awaited tools for game development and especially level design.

Additionally I have a new member in the team who will be focusing mainly on level design.

Prior this update the development was done on introductory UE 5.0 version.
Newer UE versions 5.1 and 5.2 did brake a lot of stuff and were not of much use. This is why development was mostly blocked for long period of time.

Lot of testing was done on enabling DX12, but there is some bottleneck we managed to isolate on raytraced foliage, blocking us to enable DX12. I have even consulted it with several game industry professionals, we were not able to identify exact issue.

So the game is still on DX11 and we will continue to develop it under this setup.

I replaced old terrain auto-material going back to 2018 with the latest one available, that allows new features such as virtual textures and material blends. You can see a blend between sand and stone on left when you spawn on beach.

So I hope to get rid of the 2018 look and make more modern one.

We now plan to replace several textures to new photo realistic ones. Improve texture tilling on ground.
We are already moving a lot of foliage to terrain auto-material, hoping this will help with optimization.

Additionally we plan to replace the sun, and skysphere - allowing us to better control the lightning, clouds, fog and even weather changes. This was not available when I have changed the project to UE 5.0

Having this set and done will untie my hands to work on new long promised maps.

There are some new issues. Mainly the rotation of some loot when dropped on ground. Especially the opened loot box which might be little bit annoying but still playable. Similar goes for palm leafs - but those just look funny. I will investigate this problem.

Thank you for your support! and understanding.

Join our discord community - we have a new link:

https://discord.gg/XW3jaebbwH

I will be also pleased to answer any questions.

Juraj Bachar
Game Creator