Steady as she goes.
So quarantine and personal issues have meant slow progress for both of us here at Arkode, but that doesn't mean we haven't made important advancements for the project! This week I'll be covering our main focus of late, which is prefabs.
Prefabs technology.
So something that I wish I had written about in a blog post sooner is the prefab system that we've been working on. To give you an idea of how much development time has passed since the last written update, the feature set is actually nearly completed at the base level. We're really happy with the basic facilities we are providing as a starting point for testing and will continue to work on some additional things before launch.
For those unaware, the prefab system is designed to capture sections of blocks and props to be used for later use, such as houses or walls or even nature scenes. Firstly we needed to get the capture system working, so I repurposed saving and loading code from existing systems. The major difference with this, when compared with other save systems, is the capture zone is dynamic in size, so upgrades to existing code has had to be made.
Saving and loading improvements will eventually transfer over to the world/player save system, allowing us more flexibility in world size. This may, however, come with a re-write in our voxel tech, which has been on the back burner for some time, and it continues to be delayed so we can hit more important milestones. With this one improvement alone however, we would be able to use old saves in new world sizes set from code, but without the additional re-writes, we can't dynamically resize the world in-game. Aside from some minor issues as seen in the livestreams, I got the save system, working relatively fast, which allowed me to move onto multiple saves.
Multiple saves is another improvement that will eventually be used in other areas of the project. Most notably world saves. What it allows us to do, in short, is specify a file name and file path, which is then used to facilitate multiple files to be written to and read from of the same type, depending on user selection. In this case, it means multiple prefabs can be captured and placed in the scene. Work is far from complete in finishing all of the aspects of saves, as there are a number of UX improvements we will make before demoing the system, but we have a solid foundation to work with so far.
Editor UI work.
Matthews completed a UI redesign recently, to better conform to the large list of additions and improvements we have made to the editor. This, of course, has been a bit of an undertaking, especially as he is having to learn new processes for design, as well as learning how the UE4 UI blueprints system works to make it functional. I have been working with him to make sure that it works and is correctly integrated with my code, and foundationally it's working. As with all of our work, it is a work in progress and we will continue to update and refine this as time goes on. As the prefab system work comes to a close, Matthews will then try to wrap up and polish the UI functionality as well, but this could take as long as a couple of weeks for us both to fully polish. Here is a preview so far:
To accompany this new UI, we are starting to think about how our control scheme also needs to change and will be slowly honing this as testing of the editor continues. Obviously we don't want to leave things in an unfinished state, but we believe updating stuff like UI and UX over time is more appropriate, so arent wrapping this up straight away. This is so we can get incremental feedback rather than commit to big sweeping updates that could ruin the usability of the engine. I will be focusing my efforts on other code-based features as Mattews refines the UI, and helping him on and off when he requires it. After the 2D elements, we will start looking at the 3D aspects of the UI that we want to implement, such as a proper cursor and highlighting box, which are currently just making use of debug tools within UE4.
Videos.
So as some of you may have noticed, our videos have been going up again, and I am occasionally livestreaming. This is good in terms of us getting back on track, and I will continue my efforts to put more development time in, as hard as it might be when stuck predominantly at home. Matthews continues at a good pace, and I know he is doing the same and trying to produce content where possible.
Fin.
So that wraps it up for this week, and I hope this hasn't been too long since the last one for some of you! Not a lot had happened in the last few weeks, so I didn't want to push blog updates that were essentially empty, but as always, we're trying to keep some momentum. We're currently anticipating a move in July where we won't have access to our workstations for a month, so we'll try and build up some content I can push while we're away from our University accommodations, but no promises. As always though, I hope you guys are having a nice time stuck at home and not finding it too difficult. Until next time everyone!