Unreal Island Update - I love it :)

Hey everyone,

I hope you had a great week! 

I reworked the island again and incorporated a lot of things that I learned during the last 2 weeks. I mean, I am still learning tons of things. I have a long list of tutorials for Unreal that I want to go through. But one step at a time. I can definitely say I am very excited about Unreal. The excitement actually increases the more features I use and the longer I spend in the Engine! :) 

I also made a quick Youtube video for you so you get a better idea of the island as it is right now:

=> YOUTUBE Link 

Unreal is really amazing. There are so many things that are so much better than Unity. Shadow quality for large scenes, performance in general, procedural vegetation, Terrain that can be tweaked non-destructively, collisions with Terrain and objects, usability of the editor and so much more. 

I am so glad I finally took the step to switch from Unity. But coming from Unity makes me even more grateful now :) So it was definitely a good experience to learn it the hard way.

There is still a lot to test before we can begin with the actual game design. 

For example:

• Proper Locomotion of the character: The animations now are just temporary ones from that ship with Unreal and look nasty. We will replace them when we implement our Girls.
• Interactive Vegetation: I want the character to bend vegetation when he is walking by
• Interactive Water: I want the character to swim and to be able to use a boat
• Roads: Yes, I definitely want to have a little buggy to drive around :D
• Buildings in general: For that we have not yet tested the lighting and workflow at all. So that´s going to be very exiting. But I am positive it will work just fine, like everything else does in Unreal.
• Characters: Of course I want to add our girls to the island too and start with look development of Skin, Eyes, Hair, etc.
• I am really happy with the outcome so far. And that scene is just using the basic rendering workflow, not even the raytraced one. That will add yet another level of realism to the scene. But not everyone has a raytracing GPU, so that´s also something we need to figure out how to use. 
• Another thing that I want to try is DLSSR 2 for Nvidia Cards. It´s a piece of AI-Software from them that helps increase the framerate drastically. 

Next week I plan to have a first build for you where you can run around the Island and test the performance. I am veeeery curious about the performance on lower end systems!

Alright, that´s it for this week! I hope you like the update and where we are heading! 

Have a great weekend!

PM&Team