u/flowerdragon2934

Hey all. I've been a game developer for over a year now in in indie capacity. I've used everything from Unity, game maker, Godot, Some other smaller engines and decided to try Unreal Engine because it has some features that I really enjoy I like the Unity lighting system, the virtual shadow maps. But there is so much about Unreal Engine that simply does not make sense to me and I struggle to wrap my head around. After researching it for days, which turns into weeks, learning online on courses. Some things still do not make any sense to me about Unreal Engine and seem completely and utterly broken beyond belief, or just flawed in a way that you would never be able to fix it.

For example, the landscape and world partition system. You can import a height map to make a 4K map, and Unreal Engine documentation has an ideal setup for how to do it. So I tried following that, to get the components count down to a lower more manageable number like 1000 because upon importing the 4K type map, it gives you like 4000 components which is absurd. It would take you a couple hours to walk across that with the default walking speed. But then if you change the components count and use the ideal settings on their own website, for some reason 75% of your map is now just flat space that's unoccupied and also, numerous bugs that have never been triaged or fixed, like the partition minimap editor being completely broken. I've tested that across several versions of Unreal Engine 5 and it has not worked in any of them. It will not build it, it simply doesn't work.

The lighting system is also confusing and that alone is like, its own entire thing. Learning how to get good lighting is absurdly challenging because there are several different light sources and light comes from several different places and each actor or component to the light blending process has a settings menu that's like dozens upon dozens of options that you can tweak. Like infinite possibilities if you try and compare between the atmospheric light, the skylight the directional light. It's honestly crazy

Adjusting things and optimizing things is also a complete nightmare that just doesn't make sense to me, and I am a software engineer for work so it's not like programming and working with complex systems is new to me. But it's just so brittle and crazy slow anytime you do anything. I'm using a crazy high end gaming PC on a brand new gaming project so I don't even have that much in game yet, and like.... Sometimes I get 15 minute long operations to do anything. For example like building out the HLODs... omg. 15 mins! to do one thing.

I could go on for days about different topics in Unreal Engine but it's just like in every area of Unreal Engine, There is so much that doesn't make sense to me as a novice dev where in Unity.... It just works man.

I got this height map stamp thing from the FAB store and used it to create a new map level out of it at 4K. It defaulted to the default settings but I increased the world partition grid size from 2 to 4.

Here's an image showing my settings/setup:

https://www.reddit.com/user/flowerdragon2934/comments/1uo3ibf/world_partition_grid_size_ue5/

My intention was to create smaller partitions for an open world, as the world isn't incredibly detailed or overly filled with tons of items, so I figured I could get away with more small partitions. I'd like to know if I'm acting on good logic or if this is the wrong way to do things

I'm perplexed on this quandary I've encountered. When I try and extrude a face on a facade, it moves physically inward/outward (the bottom one). The second extrude I did, it extruded properly, generating new geometry. I'm not sure why this occurs?

Back view of my extrude

Front view. We can see the facade beam here

Hey all. I've been having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to make a gabled roof facade with beams on them that meet in the middle. I'm sure there's a better way to do this. I'm trying to make a simple triangulated roof front facade with two wood beams that come off the sides and meet in the middle, and then I'm gonna insert a plane inside of it and use a boolean modifier on that, sort of like A half timbered house I guess.

The goal: Mainly, I want the triangulated front part of the facade first, and figure out the rest of the roof later

https://preview.redd.it/4mmtprcwq7ah1.png?width=836&format=png&auto=webp&s=305c33c5ed207b74bcc5b4a84a9b858a5a8751f3

My attempt

https://preview.redd.it/z42lqmf6q7ah1.png?width=1720&format=png&auto=webp&s=073368f32bb60ceb28dec8bfd359e04b39d43b0f

https://preview.redd.it/bgq7kwr3t7ah1.png?width=1717&format=png&auto=webp&s=4d531c5d6022c2a3563feea5dcad9e2f98addb6c

I'm really fighting against the boolean tool today to cut out windows in my walls and for some reason, I don't know if it's a bug or intended Uh it seems to work completely differently In certain cases. It keeps adding these strange diagonal lines that make no sense?

Here's a boolean I did on a door. Notice how there are no diagonal seams coming from the corners of the wall

https://preview.redd.it/0vb4jzciou9h1.png?width=646&format=png&auto=webp&s=f24a9b9bb0c1e1704a5a5794acbc9970a501b264

Here's another one I did for a window. Randomly, These diagonal seams appear and completely screw up everything if I try to shape the wall around the rest of the window frame..... I really don't understand it. All I did was put on a boolean modifier and add a cube inside the space of the window and then just use a boolean as default on intersect. Same exact thing I did with the door but in this case, it creates these weird seams that I can't seem to get rid of no matter what

https://preview.redd.it/sj0c7zvqou9h1.png?width=1258&format=png&auto=webp&s=13d13c69a2819340c61e7b6ba2642f6c4a2b344b

https://preview.redd.it/gcnsikahzt9h1.png?width=3439&format=png&auto=webp&s=37aec5ec0b5b229e66e5fbeaf368be6b2bce12df

I'm no geometry expert so I'm kind of struggling with this one. I want to have a corner pillar for my modular walls, but I don't want to have another extra piece that I have to drag out and connect in Unreal engine. So I'm trying to figure out what the secret combination is, So that I can just go rotate a wall 90 degrees and it will just immediately connect to another wall. I must have tried at least 10 of these combinations and haven't gotten one that actually connects perfectly. I don't know what I'm missing... If I just add a flat rectangular piece at the end, then I have an overlap in the corner and L shape ugh

Hey all. I'm facing a little bit of a quandary in my game design currently. I'm wondering if I should do instanced or seamless open world designed for the houses in my game. For example I'm creating a small farmhouse as the first thing that I make, just a simple cube with four walls and a roof. The question is, when you go inside does it clip the roof off of it and you see it top down, or do you actually fully get to go inside the home and it takes you to a completely separate level?

I have been musing on this a lot lately. The size of the homes is relatively small, like extremely small. The 3D equivalent of pokémon on the 3DS, I guess. It's not like there's a ton of stuff in there for the player to find and look through. So I'm like 70% seamless 30% instance. I think there are several cases where instance could actually be a really good idea but it would require quite a bit of work to make it meaningful to go through

The ideas that I have for instance houses being a pro are kind of interesting too. When you go inside, the interior is much larger than it looked like it would be on the outside. Or when you go inside, everything in there is an object that can be taken. But I don't know if I need that level of detail for my game or if it's just silly

There are two types of games. Ones with the core narrative, and ones without.

I'll pull a general example just off the top of my head from early 2000s: World of Warcraft versus Runescape. Runescape doesn't have a core narrative! You complete tutorial island, and that's it. BYE, have fun! You get to go do whatever you want wherever you want however you want why ever you want. Regional stories and quest arcs. Wow on the other hand was the opposite. There is a narrative from the very beginning end even if you ignore it, It still exists and you pretty much have to play into it and it surrounds you the entire time. Their core narrative at the beginning was good versus evil. A plague that started from evil necromancer's and magic users, Arthas turned to forbidden object for power, He became the big enemy overhead. After he was dealt with then it was Deathwing, and so on. World of Warcraft always has to have a core narrative that drives the entire game.

The one thing I think that is truly problematic with the core narrative approach is.... that, you always have to think of something new and unique. There has to be some new challenge, some massively new threat, or the game has no purpose of existing anymore. Sure you can introduce a new area. But if there's no struggle or central enemy or group to fight against, then there's no point. This happened with FFXIV. They truly had no idea what to do after they wrapped up their incredibly long storyline with Shadow Bringers and Endwalker... so the game kinda fell off with Dawntrail. It's new. But it's not really the same, without the "big bad" to fight against.

Which do you like more for an indie open world game and what are some things you would recommend watching out for if going either route?

Hey all. I'm a new indie dev, started 5 months ago. I've never used AI for development, code, etc as I prefer to learn things the old school way but I don't really try to involve myself in AI discussions as I prefer to keep my head down.

But lately, I've been seeing a lot of people aggressively pushing AI, and by aggressively, I mean trying to shove it down everyone's throat, and insulting or namecalling them if they don't want to use it.

For example, last week on the official Unreal Engine discord channel, I asked for advice on how to change my graphics settings with a blueprint, and this guy who is always prattling about AI gave me this ridiculous answer, citing that his "clanker" running Chat GPT codex discovered this while "autoresearching" through his own project files. I was confused and asked, "wait are you recommending something that you don't even know is true or works?" and he got all offended and name called, started saying stuff like "chatgpt is infinitely more versed in ue than you my friend (no offense) ... but if you want to make things harder for yourself for literally no reason go for it, i already had my fair share of anti-ai arguments LOL". So I searched for his name, and guy is constantly just aggressively lashing out at people namecalling them, insulting them for not wanting to use AI

I've also been warned in another discord server not to say anything negative about AI by the mods, since the community is "fully AI integrated" and "we're not newbies playing around, we're serious devs who want to actually learn game dev". Another hidden pro-AI community, parading as a game dev community.

It's honestly bewildering and kinda sad really. I'm trying my best not to notice it. But as an Unreal dev... just wow. People are really aggressive now towards people who don't wanna use AI.