Work Log

  Jade Jam Postmortem     The past 2 weeks I have been working on a jam project with some former classmates. The theme was "Jade" and we gave ourselves the month of January to complete it individually. The month long deadline didn't really concern me at first, then I realized the month was half gone and I hadn't created a project file yet. With the space game I haven't really had many hard deadlines, but now I had a deadline that I felt ready to meet head-on.  Initial Planning     As a solo act on this project, it meant that I would have to do everything by myself. Programming, no problem; but design is something that I haven't really done for a full game before. I started looking for inspiration in the theme "Jade". I thought Jade could be a name, but I didn't think I had the experience to make a game with a strong narrative. I then thought of the mineral Jade which then led me to the Wikipedia page .      Reading through the article it is appar

  Small Improvements     The past few days I've ben working on extras 2 and 3 from the last blog post : making the planet settings save as they should, and making the water look better.  Planet Settings:     Before now, the planet settings were instanced meaning that they couldn't be saved to disk. They were only instanced because the UI in Unreal lets you edit the instance of the data asset directly from the details panel of the actor that it is applied to. However, this had the side-effect that the instances would reset every time the launcher was reopened. This became very time consuming to reinput all of the settings every time I wanted to test something. Because of this I decided to make them non-instanced and spend some time making sure that the assets would save/load to/from disk.     This process was not too difficult, just time consuming. I removed all of the "DefaultToInstanced" and "EditInlineNew" specifiers from the UCLASS of all of the data asse

  Rewriting "Everything"     It's been a while, but I'm back with lots of progress to show. I finalized the multithreading and fixed the issues with it. I fixed an issue with saving the game that I have had forever and just now got around to. I also finally implemented the better texture generation method that doesn't deal with atlases. Multithreading:     So the original issue I was having with the m ultithreading was a race condition where some of the TerrainFaces would finish generating before others triggering the function that should happen only when all faces are done calculating. The faces that weren't finished yet would then have no data on the height of the terrain, thus defaulting to 0 for the entire face. This function being called prematurely was hard to deal with, because it had to be called from the main game thread. This would mean that I would have to open the new thread to do the calculations, then go back to the main thread to finish the oper