Any unreal engine programmers here?

[Markbnj]

Started messing with UE4 a week or so ago. The entire platform is now free on a royalty-based license, and there is enough reasonably-priced content available in the marketplace that it might just be possible to make something fun without a team of modelers and texture artists.

Unfortunately it is still not possible to make something without getting pretty deep into the graphics, i.e. meshes, textures, materials, maps, etc. That's not brand new terrain for me, but a lot has changed since I last delved into the subject. So far I have made a terrain in L3DT and imported it into a landscape. I created and tried applying a material network to weight map soil, grass, and snow layers onto the terrain but so far I can only get the weight blended soil layer to show. If I try to paint on a height-blended layer (snow or grass) then the texture on the landscape component goes all to hell.

Anyway just wondering if anyone else is messing with it and wants to share notes.

 

[purbeast0]

i haven't messed with UE4, but i'm in the middle of an online multiplayer async turn based game using Unity3D. i started it a few months ago and i'm pretty much done with it functionality wise, but i am working on cleaning up the interface and stuff.

i have no prior experience with graphics and textures and stuff, and am still kind of lost to be honest. however, as with what it sounds like with UE4, there is an asset store with Unity where you can get a lot of pre-designed stuff if need be. i've spent $125 on 2 items from the asset store as it is now. 1 is for allowing online play with unity on iOS and Android without having to pay for a pro license, and the other is for the UI kit that i'm using which makes UI stuff much easier and prettier than I could do myself.

whenever i finish this (which may be longer than i hoped since i have a newborn now) i would like to mess with UE4 though.

 

[Markbnj]

I will probably take a look at Unity at some point before I launch into an actual project. Also Cryengine. I managed to solve my issue today by painting over the landscape with a base weight layer before adding new layers. It's either a bug or just something that isn't very well explained.

What's cool so far about the unreal ecosystem is the tools and the marketplace. I like the extensible visual HLSL editing, and the way the IDE operates. On the downside it's not very stable. Just messing around with my little test world I've crashed it at least six times.

 

[slugg]

I used to do some modding and hacking on the old Quake engines. Was a lot of fun. But it seems like everyone else has come up with all the cool ideas that are achievable by individuals, so I kind of gave up with game development. UE4 looks awesome; best of luck!

 

[Markbnj]

I used to do some modding and hacking on the old Quake engines. Was a lot of fun. But it seems like everyone else has come up with all the cool ideas that are achievable by individuals, so I kind of gave up with game development. UE4 looks awesome; best of luck!

Thanks, it's been interesting. Last night I finally got to the point in my workflow where I could generate a nice terrain mesh with normals and splats, get it imported, and then apply a material that uses the splatmap to generate pretty decent grass, cliffs, beaches, etc. Still have a lot of work to do, and this is just the most basic stuff that makes up a world, but having a lot of fun with it so far. I'll post some screenshots when I get the terrain in its final form, and before I start decorating it.

 

[TechBoyJK]

I really like the Cryengine Sandbox UI.

I also like the Unreal community.

I used to spend 10-15+ hours a week playing in the CryEngine2 Sandbox and had even made a map which was pretty self contained. Had loading screen 'hit enter to start'.. spawn point, 2 missions, lots of ai, and a 'mission completed' mechanism which restarted the map back to the beginning loading screen.

I tried to import it into the newest Sandbox, but it was no-go. I've been tempted to reinstall the old Sandbox just to spin the map back up, and at least record a video of me playing through it. I spent a lot of time on it and wish I had a video to show for it.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Back in the days when there was the first unreal engine with the unreal tournament game, me and some friends made a a few levels. We also created a level called the red light district of Amsterdam complete with canals and authentic houses. And with sound effects, light effects, bars and nightclubs with music and hidden teleporters.
It was fun passing some houses where people were getting busy, red curtains closed and with sound effects of heavy moaning. :biggrin:
I liked the sniper levels and sniper clans the most from unreal tournament. Huge levels to roam around in and explore.