Right now, most characters in the game I'm working on use behavior trees, a form of magical incantation mastered by the ancients. I have a hate-hate relationship with them. UE5 state trees, OTOH, have proven much more sane to code for, though only 3 NPCs use them. I hope to get them all using state trees, as I want all races to act other than like hordes of crazed assassins. It makes actual hordes of crazed assassins very sad, for they are all rugged individualists.

#UE5 #RPG

The workers will soon get tools, and something to carry their loads in. They are chopping trees and cutting gems with their bare hands atm.

This needs to get tied to the vendors' work days (vendors go home at night, but there is a night shift). It's a little simplistic right now, but it works. I can do it better with Smart Objects.

I've got resources NPCs can harvest regrowing. Plants. Trees. Not sure how to deal with things like gems and gold, which I think I'll either have a long regrowth, or after a long time, randomly (or in an area) put the item somewhere else. At the moment, everything grows at a 5-minute rate to maturity.

There is a cave level, though right now the minerals are at the surface. I'm planning on having both.

I get to get a mine tram working again for the cave level. I had one in a very early instantiation of a similar game (where I learned a lot about what not to do in UE).

Soon, I'll want to program some customs. The NPCs can harvest, but not plant. They have no seasonal behaviors yet. They need activities like eating, sleeping, and play.

I'm guessing I can't replace an entire forest with Smart Objects, but this should be interesting. How human players might get to use them (or something similar) is unknown at this time.

The sky tram is throwing errors. Not sure what started that. The ground tram works. I like the method I used, but mostly for the former. I think I may need to use a spline (groan) for the latter, but we'll see. Turns are a bit abrupt, I think.

After battling with Smart Objects (SO) in 5.6.1, I decided my best options were (a) to store the identification of the SO the worker is at with the worker, so they don't flip between them with every stroke (they check to see if they already have one saved), and (b) to wipe out the SO and recreate it as needed, rather than play games with switches. That means growing plants have no SO, and thus can't be harvested until maturity, when the code gives it back. I can disable/enable for other situations, but sometimes that just wasn't working, and I tired of debugging Unreal's code, which was later changed in 5.7.

I'm having fun with UE5 state machines. Can you tell?

#UE5 #RPG

Yay! I fixed a bug with some NPCs who collect resources and drop them off. Now to add some bells and whistles to their work.

#UE5 #RPG

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I have been tasked with converting some spaghetti blueprint of a plugin to C++ to get rid of some performance issues.

After successfully converting the first critical part, the CPU time of that part is down from 8 ms to 17 µs 🤯

I knew blueprints are not very performant, but that's A LOT. For context, it was doing some simple math on ~8k array elements and adding them to another array.

#UnrealEngine #UE5 #GameDev #Optimization

Some UI work. Settings on menu and ingame.

Im trying to do them clean like Dirt Rally 2 or the new AC rally, still provisional but final should be close to this.

What you think?
#UnrealEngine #UE5 #Gamedev #Indiedev

It's not often that I get to just use #UE5Coro as a normal user, without thinking about new features or handling even more corner cases. It's really nice, I feel like "regular" C++ is a lesser language. Last time this happened to me was with #Qt and C++03.

I know that I'm tooting my own horn here, but it's not like I'm doing it for sales; it's free software. I hope it makes your life with #UE5 (or #UE4!) easier if you're into #coroutines (or #i18n 🙃), even if only for editor tooling.

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