Episode 3 - Progress, Struggle, and Opportunity
So there's good news, bad news, and also good news.
Good news is, progress is being made! Admittedly, I've been slacking off a bit lately, but I'm just about done reaching the progress that I've made in the Unity build over to Unreal, which means I can start working on new stuff that isn't just the same three locations I've been showing you seven thousand times.
But anyway, here's what the project's looking like in Unity (left) vs. Unreal (right) (probably going to change since I need to screw with lighting):
As you can tell, perhaps the biggest problem with Unreal's visuals is that it's really, really shiny. It pretty much screams "WOAAAH NEXT GEN VIDEO GAMING" I'll need to look into how to mute everything a bit more, make it look more sophisticated.
Alright, time for the bad news. See all those 3D models in the screenshot above? Yeah, I'm gonna have to remake them. Turns out, the 3D models that I have (which are from archive3d.net and not made by me) are super high-poly. Like, absurdly high poly. That cabinet at the end of the hallway there? 115k polys. Combined with everything else in the scene, everything slows to a crawl. Because of that, I'll have to take the role of redoing nearly every model in the scene, and that's going to be a pain in the ass.
But hey, let's close off this oddly short post with something uplifting. I've got a website up! You can view it here!!!!
I made the site from scratch, but it's not terribly advanced so that's not a big deal. Still, I like the visual design of it, especially how the TV in the background effectively frames the snippet I wrote about the game, centering visual attention to it. I'll be updating it with new info, but in the meantime, give me your feedback about it! I'm shite at CSS so there's probably some broken elements floating around there that I can't see.
Anyway, this has been a pretty short post, but I'll have some more interesting news here soon. There's a few tricks up my sleeves I'd like to show off, but I can't just yet since it's not time yet. Get hyped or something.