Tech - Week One
The first week of the project has been and gone and it's been one of working out how things are going to work and looking into possibilities behind our many ideas. We've had a strong start, started the whiteboxing process for which I've aided by creating a procedural map generation tool which as the name suggests generates a map procedurally. The idea being that it works as a base to then apply BSP over the top, replacing the location of the tools geometry. It makes it much easier working with this than from a blank canvas. And is easy to change if it's not working for any reason. Once Kit started using it to whitebox in engine we realised it would work great, with some further development, as a tool to quickly generate the slums in the distance. So that's a possibility for development later on in the project.
As well as building that I have got my first pass prototype of the 'modular building tool' done. At it's current state it places walls and roof modular pieces together to make a building at the size you set it at, which is it's primary function. You are also able to swap between 2 given wall pieces. Even though it's a start it's got a long way to go. It shows the primary function and gives an idea of how you could change the modular pieces but is going to need a lot of work to get it where it needs to be.
I have also started on the prototype for the 'spline based cable tool'. This was relatively easy to get it's primary function working, placing meshes along a spline. But getting it so that you can change the mesh, tweak locations and having variable objects placed along the spline may be harder than I had first anticipated. It is something that is going to be at the top of the list for researching into at the start of week 2.
Along side making the prototypes I have being doing research in what is already in the market and how they have gone about creating similar solutions. This has been easier said than done as all the finished tools currently available are paid for and anything that has more information behind the workings of aren't finished. That's just for UE4 tools made using blueprint, any other tools in proprietary engines aren't accessible and are only shown briefly in some marketing videos.
My research has also looked into individual solutions for use within the tools themselves. Looking into using Static mesh instances for the modular build tool after using them in the procedural map generation tool, but it turns out you can't bake lighting information for a mesh instance so I've had to look into using a different solution so that we can have baked lighting in the level, as having fully dynamically lit levels can give a performance hit at runtime.
Something that I have learnt a lot about this week is working with arrays. It's not a new concept to me but is definitely something I have come a long way with this week, especially on how to apply different information to different indexes and the resizing and scaling of the array. This week I am hoping to further my research into how to go about fulfilling the feature list for each tool as well as still looking into what's already on the market. parallel to that i'll be hopefully adding some more base functionality to the spline based tool as well as making the 'random asset location tool' prototype. To see how the development is going as it's happening don't forget to follow me on twitter @KEProject_E.
