Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on. It was ages ago now, the project’s concluded, and nothing here identifies any of it, so I’m sure nobody’ll mind if I talk about my approach a bit here.| joe wintergreen internet zone
A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the light. The fog is all volumetric, so […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I’ve been messing around in the aforementioned Scythe level editing tool for UE5, here’s some of what I’ve been doin’| joe wintergreen internet zone
This is a “texture browser” utility widget for UE5.5 that presents materials in the style you’d expect from a level editor in the 90s: as square thumbnails. Unreal normally presents materials in the content browser as lit and mapped to a sphere. This isn’t useful for much. When you’re making a level, you want to actually see the images you’re working with. So this plugin presents them that way. It looks like Hammer’s texture […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
If you use UE5, you might have noticed there’s a new-ish feature called Data-Driven Console Variables, and you might also have noticed that nothing comes up when you Google this. There’s not much to it, but in the interests of having something come up when you Google this, here’s what I’ve figured out about data-driven […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Hammer, king of level editors, has a view mode where the scene is unlit, but not fullbright; it’s shaded to make it easier to parse. Unreal doesn’t have that! But you can add it yourself, really easily, with no C++ or Blueprint – just a postprocess material and a line in a config file. Here’s […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Unreal has a reputation amoung the ill-informed for being plagued by shader compilation stutter. As an attribute of Unreal itself, this is basically made up – devs are just not always doing what they are supposed to do pre-ship to avoid this issue. I’ll elaborate, but basically, to avoid compiling shaders during gameplay, you want […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I’ve been testing a friend’s WIP level design plugin for Unreal for a while now, and while it’s still very early, it’s available now on Patreon and you should support it there. It’s bringing Source 2 style geometry editing to Unreal, allowing level design to properly be a thing again, and I made a video […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Here’s a tool I made a while back that you can buy: it lets you automatically create instanced materials for many textures at once, given a base material with parameters to fill. This saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of textures you want to turn into material instances, like: 200 […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
One of the things I’m not is an animator, but every few years I give it a crack, and recently I gave it a crack inside Unreal, which now has really good rigging and animating tools. I made a complete Max Payne dive – sideways, front and back, all blending together just like in the […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Here is an incomplete list of unreal engine plugins that I like Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Way before Half-Life Alyx had been announced, I spent a couple of days one Christmas remaking Half-Life 2’s headcrabs (using their existing art and anims) in UE4, but with additional physical reactivity – they can lose their footing and struggle to recover, smash into things and active-ragdoll around after a bad jump, get picked up […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Rush Hour has received an Epic MegaGrant! Rush Hour aims to level up real-time workflows for vehicle animation and build on what Unreal Engine already offers. By utilising vehicle AI, similar to what you would find in games, to act as a stunt driver, it reduces the work animators need to put in to get the physics looking correct and instead focus on directing the scene, all from within the same editor where you are building your environment. Thanks to the generous support of Epic Games, Rush ...| GDCorner
2022 Has been a fantastic year. Rush Hour saw its initial release, and great progress has been made on the next version. Before I take a holiday break, I wanted to give a status update on Rush Hour and the plans for the near future.| GDCorner
On Halloween 2021, I decided to try doing a mini game-jam style project. I wanted to make something simple, yet atmospheric. Possibly a simple wave based shooter. There was no solid plan, just an idea to make “something”. In this retrospective review, I share some of the goals, strengths and weaknesses of the project, and any lessons learned.| GDCorner
Have you looked at camouflage in games recently? It looks amazing. Yet, it doesn’t seem to stop you being seen in a split second. Is that a limitation of the technology or is it by design? Let’s have a look at some of the techniques and try recreating some of the ways game developers make camouflage look really good while still allowing easy visibility of characters.| GDCorner
