Episode 4 - It's all about the graffics.
Oh shit are you ready for some pretty pictures? Oh my god watch out here they come!!!!!
As you can probably tell, I've been doing some work on other parts of the level.
With the first picture, I've been trying to experiment with outdoor foliage to make it look right. The biggest problem I've been having with that is that when you have foliage, you pretty much have to commit yourself to having metric fucktons of it in your level. Making a forest requires that you have a lotta trees and a lotta grass and a lotta bushes, or else it'll look really bare and unrealistic. When you have all that stuff in a single level, it becomes really difficult to do lighting builds in it because it takes literally hours for it to all render. Not only is this annoying and inconvenient, but it also makes it much more difficult to troubleshoot stuff because you have entire hours-long lapses between tests, and there are so many variables that if something goes wrong, good luck trying to figure it out.
Right now what I'm planning on doing is setting up a system called LOD (level of detail), where the further away you get from an object, the less detailed it becomes, thus saving memory and all that jazz. Problem is, from what I can tell, you have to set up the less-detailed-versions of the models yourself, so that's more busy work that I'll have on my plate. Either way there's gotta be a better way of doing it, because as of now, even though the less is fairly small, doing simple stuff in it takes ages.
The second image showcases the usage of particle effects that I'm implementing in the game. That foggy gray cloud you see in front of the floodlight is an example of that, and it's a handy way of faking volumetric lighting. Right now I'm going to have to do some tweaking with it because it looks really pixelated and weird, but at least it's something.
The third image isn't anything particularly new or exciting, just showing off Unreal Engine 4's global illumination and light bouncing. To be honest, I actually cheated and dug into the .ini files of UE4 and cranked up the production quality values. The result is something that looks really damn good, though it increases light build times a ton and also increases memory usage ingame, so there's some optimization to be done.
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But yeah, for now, the level is pretty much nearing completion. There's still a lot of work to be done on the graphics, and I haven't even started on implementing sound work yet (which is really important, and I plan to spend a lot of time perfecting this), but hey, work is being done at least.