#unreal editor

[krissiefox]

Blogs run by game devs, blogs about game design, and blogs about game mods.

https://darsycho.tumblr.com/ Game dev who makes cool and spooky Doom engine stuff! I also really enjoy their avatar image. :)

https://www.tumblr.com/duskdev Developer of games like Dusk, Squirrel stapler, Chop Goblins.

https://www.tumblr.com/aenderlara Blender stuff, 3d modeling

https://www.tumblr.com/blackblooms 3D artist and game dev, working on the game Rawmen.

https://fuckyeahleveldesign-blog.tumblr.com/ Blog about level design in video games

https://www.tumblr.com/sodaraptor Developer of games such as Hypnagogia and Late Homework.

https://www.tumblr.com/graphiterevenant A graphical overhaul mod for the Binding Of Isaac.

https://puppetcombo.tumblr.com/ Cool indie horror game dev!

https://www.tumblr.com/rightstickdev Developer of a game called DoubleShake!

https://billiebustupofficial.tumblr.com/ Developer blog for the game Billie Bust Up!

https://makegames.tumblr.com/ A blog about game creation.

https://snackodev2.tumblr.com/ Development Blog for Snacko!

https://behemothgames.tumblr.com/ Creators of Castle Crashers, Battleblock Theater and Pit People!

https://www.tumblr.com/thefirsttree Developer of "The First Tree" and "We Harvest Shadows".

https://blog.studiominiboss.com/ Developers of "Celeste" and "Towerfall".

https://www.tumblr.com/dreamlink3d Dev blog for the game Dream Link 3D.

https://dronaroid.tumblr.com/ Developer of the game HeartRender.

https://www.tumblr.com/samuraiunicorn Dev blog for the game Samurai Unicorn!

https://campadog.tumblr.com/ A nice dog furry who is making a cute platformer game!

https://leveldesigninspirationmachine.tumblr.com/ Images to inspire video game level designers!

https://jeffmumm.tumblr.com/ Developer of a Guinea Pig game!

https://www.tumblr.com/obgd Blender and Unreal Tutorials!

https://timetocode.tumblr.com/ A blog about game development and procedural content generation.

https://www.tumblr.com/shawnthebro Programming tutorials for Unreal engine!

https://www.tumblr.com/imagaverse Developer of a game called Busta!

https://armorgames.tumblr.com/ Flash and iPhone game developers

https://www.tumblr.com/blackblooms Developer of the game Irredeamable!

https://www.tumblr.com/aw0gamedev Developer of "Whiskers & Wags" and "Risha".

https://matata.work/ Game Jams, programming, Unreal Engine and more!

[someblakearts]

System Shock 2 in Unreal Engine 5

Tools, tools, tools

Back when I worked in the games industry, I was a tools guy by trade. It was a bit of a mix between developing APIs and toolkits for other developers, designing database frontends and automated scripts to visualise memory usage in a game's world, or reverse engineering obscure file formats to create time-saving gadgets for art creation.

I still tend to do a lot of that now in my spare time to relax and unwind, whether it's figuring out the binary data and protocols that makes up the art and assets from my favourite games, or recreating systems and solutions for the satisfaction of figuring it all out.

A Shock to the System

A while back I spent a week or so writing importer tools, logic systems and some basic functionality to recreate System Shock 2 in Unreal Engine 5. It got to the stage where importing the data from the game was a one-click process - I clicked import and could literally run around the game in UE5 within seconds, story-missions and ship systems all working.

Most of Dark engine's logic is supported but I haven't had the time to implement AI or enemies yet. Quite a bit of 3D art is still a bit sketchy, too. The craziest thing to me is that there are no light entities or baked lightmaps placed in the levels. All the illumination you can feast your eyes on is Lumen's indirect lighting from the emissive textures I'd dropped into the game. It has been a fun little exercise in getting me back into Unreal Engine development and I've learnt a lot of stuff as usual.

Here is a video of me playing all the way up to the ops deck (and then getting lost before I decided to cut the video short - it's actually possible to all the way through the game now). Lots of spoilers in this video, obviously, for those that haven't played the game.

What it is

At it's core, it's just a recreation of the various logic-subsystems in System Shock 2 and an assortment of art that has been crudely bashed into Unreal Engine 5. Pretty much all the textures, materials, meshes and maps are converted over and most of the work remaining is just tying them together with bits of C++ string. I hope you also appreciate that I sprinkled on some motion-blur and depth of field to enhance the gameplay a little. Just kidding - I just didn't get around to turning that off in the prefab Unreal Engine template I regularly use.

Tool-wise, it's a mishmash of different things working together:

There's an asset converter that organises the art into an Unreal-Engine-compatible pipeline. It's a mix of Python scripting, mind numbingly dull NodeJS and 3dsmaxscript that juggles data. It recreates all the animated (and inanimate) textures as Unreal materials, meshifies and models the map of the ship, and processes the objects and items into file formats that can be read by the engine.

A DB to Unreal converter takes in DarkDBs and spits out JSON that Unreal Engine and my other tools can understand and then brings it into the Engine. This is the secret sauce that takes all the levels and logic from the original game and recreates it in the Unreal-Dark-hybrid-of-an-engine. It places the logical boundaries for rooms and traps, lays down all the objects (and sets their properties) and keys in those parameters to materialise the missions and set up the story gameplay.

Another tool also weeds through the JSON thats been spat out previously and weaves it into complex databases in Unreal Engine. This arranges all the audio logs, mission texts and more into organised collections that can be referenced and relayed through the UI.

The last part is the Unreal Engine integration. This is the actual recreation of much of the Dark Engine in UE, ranging all the way from the PDA that powers the player's journey through the game, to the traps, buttons and systems that bring the Von Braun to life. It has save-game systems to store the state of objects, inventories and all your stats, levels and progress. This is all C++ and is built in a (hopefully) modular way that I can build on easily should the project progress.

Where it's at

As I mentioned, the levels themselves are a one-click import process. Most of Dark engine's logic, quirks and all, is implemented now (level persistence and transitions, links, traps, triggers, questvars, stats and levelling, inventory, signals/responses, PDA, hacking, etc.) but I still haven't got around to any kid of AI yet. I haven't bought much in the way of animation in from the original game yet, either, as I need to work out the best way to do it. I need to pull together the separate systems and fix little bugs here and there and iron it out with a little testing at some point.

Lighting-wise, this is all just Lumen and emissive textures. I don't think it'll ever not impress me how big of a step forward this is in terms of realistic lighting. No baking of lightmaps, no manually placing lighting. It's all just emissive materials, global/indirect illumination and bounce lighting. It gets a little overly dark here and there (a mixture of emissive textures not quite capturing the original baked lighting, and a limitation in Lumen right now for cached surfaces on complex meshes, aka the level) so could probably benefit with a manual pass at some point, but 'ain't nobody got time for that for a spare-time project.

The unreal editor showcasing some of the systems and levels.

Where it's going

I kind of need to figure out exactly what I'm doing with this project and where to stop. My initial goal was just to have an explorable version of the Von Braun in Unreal Engine 5 to sharpen my game dev skills and stop them from going rusty, but it's gotten a bit further than that now. I'm also thinking of doing something much more in-depth video/blog-wise in some way - let me know in the comments if that's something you'd be interested in and what kind of stuff you'd want to see/hear about.

The DB to JSON tool that churns out System Shock 2 game data as readable info

Anyway - I began to expand out with the project and recreate assets and art to integrate into Unreal Engine 5. I'll add more as I get more written up.

[gamereporter]

Bandai Namco e Look North World se unem para criar jogo de Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance no Fortnite

Em uma colaboração inédita, a Bandai Namco Entertainment America Inc. e a Look North World anunciaram, durante a edição 2024 da San Diego Comic Convention, a criação de uma ilha no Unreal Editor para Fortnite (UEFN). A iniciativa celebra a estreia da série de anime Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance, que será lançada em breve na Netflix. A Look North World, conhecida por seu trabalho inovador em…

[the-ghost-bird]

Based on a dream i had last night about a haunted house screaming at me to stay.

[shawnthebro]

Patch notes and news are important to keep players in the loop. Let’s improve their experience!

[traceyc-uk]

Do you ship your mc with any hogwarts legacy characters?

Thanks for your message 😊 I thought I’d draw an answer and maybe I’m misunderstanding the term ship so someone might have to correct me because I’m old

But to answer the question: not at this moment. But that’s not to say its something that won’t develop in time, but like this scenario for example it’ll be small moments open to interpretation 🩷

[aviyx]

satine -1 hand because hands are hell when you have no reference

[gracies-doodles05]

Really interesting fact that many people don’t know about, Hozier wrote his entire discography specifically about whatever ship I have decided to fixate on for that month

[rebellionsuite]

one of my favorite pastimes is looking up “____ hozier edit” and seeing what kind of devastation or life-changing concept i’m met with

[nrcnewspaperclub]

At least it’s not worse than the anon from the nrc confessions that sells Leona’s feet pics -lost anon

THE ANON FROM NRC CONFESSIONS THAT WHAT???

HOW DO THEY EVEN GET THOSE???

[arenaconspiracy]

somewhere between proof of concept and actual development

clan arena (like) map for Fortress Forever, heavily Unreal Tournament inspired, still in development. devbox_carpark_v3 (it's like greybox but with devtextures)

sorry, some of these screenshots are kind of awful (and also there's some visual bugs, not much i can do)

development of this map is ongoing, i'm happy with how this version looks right now, but i plan to advance past this (mostly with actual textures, and replacing the more intricate brush detail with models, and adding more detail overall)

[rashs-silly-little-games]

Tried to do something different...

Good evening! Since my last game jam project, I've been sorta meandering around a little bit. I've been trying to find the "spark" again. I've been very burnt out on just existing and I felt like I wanted to do something new, but yet something familiar. I ended up playing Fortnite with a friend, and he had suggested trying out Unreal Editor for Fortnite; How people make custom game modes in Epic's semi-recent "metaverse" approach to the game.

Bored and tired of just being alive, I gave it an install and gave it a spin. I figured that since it was basically a watered down version of Unreal Engine, it would be a cakewalk to get something up and running. After all, I can whip up a feature for something I'm working on in 10 minutes if I can focus. How hard could it be?

Real quick, before I get into any real specifics, keep in mind that I grew up using Roblox, and still sometimes do on occasion. It's the closest analogue I can think of to UEFN, especially one that's "battle-tested" as it were, so there will be a lot of comparisons, namely in the terms of ease of use. After all, the majority of these platforms are played on by children, and while they're not stupid for the most part, having a scary interface and a hard to understand setup for programming and engine work is definitely not how you get them started early, so to speak. Alright, lets get started! But where to start... Let's start with the biggest difference; Fortnite Creative.

Fortnite lets you load into a project in the game itself and lets you build things in a genuine creative mode. It's not like a half assed creative mode either, it's actually pretty well thought out, you get access to all the building stuff, some props and buildings from the actual game over the years, and stuff called Devices. In short, Devices are pre-programmed objects that you can place int he world, and you can set them to listen for events given off by other devices to let you add custom functionality, like this timer that teleports you to an arena when the game starts, and I can hook up this sword giver device to listen to the same timer and give players a sword when it goes off.

And this is without the editor! You need the editor to get started, of course, and you have to have both open to do creative mode, but you can just freely run around and build and get a layout without having to touch a line of code, and even have some base functionality without having to program anything! It's actually fairly intuitive. If I remember right, Roblox used to have a "Build" mode as well, I think circa 2010? i remember being upset when they removed it as a child, because I didn't want to install Studio. It was pretty bare bones if i remember right, though. You had a limited set of tools and there weren't a lot of scripted objects you could get without using the toolbox for free models.

Enough digressing! I actually have a gripe about it! It's very overwhelming. There's just... a lot! It's not as bad in the creative mode, and we'll get to UEFN itself in a minute, but my first impressions were honestly very confusing and overwhelming! There's a ton of options and boxes and flags you can set and while it gives you a lot of control, I feel like I had to do a lot of research before just jumping in like I did to make anything. Wanna make custom functionality or game loops? Then you're booting up the Editor and using Verse.

First, the editor fucking sucks!! It's a watered down version of Unreal Engine, for one, but instead of keeping the layout the same, it's almost like an overhauled fork. Some stuff is the same, you can make new actors and such, you can make new blueprint classes, but you can't edit them out of the templates. It's also just... unstable as hell? Like, it crashes more than Unity ever did, and Unity crashed a lot! Unreal's never crashed on me. I think part of it has to do with the fact that you have to have Fortnite open in the background to actively test features and push code. This caps out my graphics card most of the time, causing my entire computer to freak out, kill either UEFN or Fortnite, or both! It's a pain in the ass!!

And... Verse. Why? I don't really understand why every single metaverse concept has to have a different programming language, or has to use one that isn't already established. Like, VR Chat uses Udon, a language they made, Roblox uses Lua, but at least that was an established popular language, And now UEFN has Verse. Verse, for those who didn't know that it was made by the guy who made Haskell like I did until right before writing this, is like if Python and C++ had a crack baby. The syntax is... kinda gross. I don't like it.

I wonder who this is for, to be honest. If they know the majority of their userbase who would want to make custom stuff is teenagers or kids, why wouldn't they use a watered down version of Blueprints? With how easy it is to use the Creative mode, by comparison, wouldn't have been able to keep it just as simple or easier to understand for newcomers? Maybe I'm overthinking and nitpicking, but I have the same opinion on Roblox too. Asking a kid to learn Lua, while doable, is very confusing unless you dive deep into it. Most are gonna bounce off this.

It kinda makes sense? But I think I've been spoiled by easier languages for too long. To be honest with you, the more I used verse the more I felt like custom fortnite games really only have it for super complex logic. Everything that I personally would want to do I can do in just creative, in ways that make more sense without confusing myself with the funky syntax. This was the route I ended up going to make the little sword fighting minigame I was working on for the week.

Should you use Unreal Editor for Fortnite? Only if you're already playing it a lot and want to make your own minigames on it. If you're not keen on coding, stick to creative mode with it, at least until you decide you want to get in on actual programming. If you just wanna make something small scale that you can share with friends? Sure! It's a fun little time waster, if nothing else.

Otherwise? Already a game dev and looking into it? Just make your own damn game, dude.

Don't let that promise of money draw you in, either. Do it because you wanna do something different, have fun with it!

[tanadrin]

feeling the urge to bust out the level editor for ut2k4, but trying to find online documentation for a 20 year old version of UnrealEd sounds like a huge pain in the ass

[hazyaltcare]

Icons of Editor ARG Wilbur Soot with dreamcore and lovecore.

Like and/or reblog if you save. Credit is appreciated if you use these icons.

Mod Haze (🎮Greyson)

[shiveringsoldier]

There is so much wrong with this statement that I don’t know where to begin, but also watching Lawrence of Arabia on your phone should be punishable by firing squad I think