Back in February, I made my third zone called Upper Dungeon. At the time I had experimented with a different way to go about things called the BSP method. Over time my game grew to have 15 zones in it with another 10 planned in the future. With many of the earlier ones getting some improvements as I developed my owns skills at doing things better.
Upper Dungeon was one of the zones I almost always skipped over unless I was applying a general update to settings among other things. I didn’t like how it turned out and the amount of time I spend on making a zone, in general, is a lot of time.
With plans to have 25 zones in my game, I suspected a few might not make the cut and I’d make needed adjustments to account for that. I had been debating for quite some time if this was going be the first zone that was going to get axed.
After a lot of thinking and realizing it was not as big of a zone as I had recalled. I decided to spend a couple of days trying to patch it up. If things worked out I’d keep it and if not then it was time to say goodbye.
This is one of my former screenshots of how things turned out the first time. This is the main entryway and this map is riddled with meshes being a few pixels off here or there in placement. Along with just gaping holes where pixel imperfections of placement compounded over distance and made quite the mess in random spots not easy to just fix.
There were some areas were fifty or even hundreds of meshes need to be selected, moved, or even replaced. Not a fun activity but it was needed to even address how bad some spots where.
One of the things I liked about the method I was trying out when I first made this zone was doing things I usually stayed away from. One of those things tends to be long stairways. It’s not just as easy as rotating a ceiling to 45 degrees and sliding it perfectly into place. The meshes are a pixel in width and you don’t have diagonal movement. Even when you think something is perfect you look at it from a different viewing point and notice gaps. So it can be a bit frustrating and time-consuming.
This is officially the longest stairs in one run in my game. I took this screenshot in the middle of deleting everything but the steps. There where slight pixel width gaps in the ceiling mesh placements once in a while to the point it had to all be redone. The walls were a bit of a mess as well. I even selected and moved all the stairs just a tad.
Once everything was done including lighting changes to this zone. this Is what it looks like now. Quite a difference.
No matter how many times you run through a zone sometimes it’s amusing what ended up escaping your attention. I had one stairway where I had moved it and I missed selecting a step at some point in the process. This is why it’s always important to run around in different directions and you never know what got missed. An entire pair of stairs missing was quite the thing to miss.
Back to the starting area that I showed early in this post that had a lot of issues. After fixing it up which being in developer mode at the spot I’m at is not the most flatting point of view. You can see I added quite a few things. It still had the old lighting so it looks like it has an open ceiling with how the light is.
After a lighting pass you can see quite an improvement. I then went in and walked around as a character and from the developer's viewport to see what other small changes I could make.
It was getting close to what I wanted but not quite there yet. You can still see there are some issues with corners on the walls. The little way I’ve learned to handle that in this cased made it more noticeable so I had to redo a couple of things.
This is the final screenshot taken with Unreal Engine 4’s high-resolution software. While it is capable of taking over a 30 MB screenshot that seemed a bit excess to upload so I took a low resolution one.
The entire map went over the dramatic changes that took place that I’ve shown with this entryway. It only took a couple of nights to correct it and make it a lot better. As such, I’ll now be this zone.
Final Thoughts
You might have noticed it has been about a month since my last update on how things are going. With how large and complex things are getting along with wanting to make some things correct I hit a bit of a wall. A lot of things I’m learning as I go. So faceplants into a wall are going to happen. When they do there is nothing to share so I don’t.
This also means I’ve made some changes to my road map. Some stuff got pushed to the back burner and will be delayed by three months. Other stuff I’m expecting to only be behind for about a month. For now that not a big deal since the last few months of the year where empty for dealing with any issues I hit for year one. This is at least a three year project so I expect some fun and struggling times ahead as things get even harder.
