DMUGA Week 31 - Is it playable already?... Has it saved yet?... Has it crashed again?

Basically, the general process throughout this week seemed to be waiting, saving, more waiting, and crashing. Nothing's going right and we're so close to the end of the project but it doesn't even work! I'm not kidding when I say "saving the level/project takes forever". It genuinely takes about 20mins per time when saving, sometimes it even took 35-40mins! So if you want to test something, it will take hours just to try it out. It is beyond a joke and very frustrating because it doesn't happen on our computers at home.

It is weird to think that even up until this point, we have never been able to play our level all the way through... There's just a tiny bit left to do before we reach this circumstance. I have been really excited to finally get a play-through, and so far, I love it! It feels like an actual mini-game/level, and I'm so glad it is nearly there. We just have 1 more week technically until the DMU hand-in date, and we have to touch up on areas that need adjusting the most/get it running.

To kick off this week, some news appeared that our labs are only open until 5pm... What is this madness?! I genuinely don't like that, but in a way, it speeds us up a bit to get the most important things done as a group quickly, instead of being a bit slow and finishing it off in the evening.
Anyway, I finally made my entrance tree LODs and got the engine from Anya to put in/change a long list of things that needed doing. E.g.

-Sounds
-Rose Icon
-Removing/Adding collision meshes where appropriate
-Varied leaf material instances
-Change directional lighting angle by 5 degrees
-Create a dappled lighting material
-Sort the bird sound attenuation radius so it isn't underwater
-Re-import some improved materials
-Make shadows darker in Post Process
-Populate final area some more
-Make god rays & place where appropriate
-Change positioning of some billboards at the start
-Sort out the maze material + populate better
+ A lot more.

Then in the afternoon, we got around to making the Dark World! This has been literally untouched since week 2, and I was hoping that my plan to copy the main level, plus, anything I made in week 2 (like the atmospheric fog, emissive water, lighting etc), into the new Dark World would work... And it did! The following screenshots are of literally 1 and a half days worth of work (Obviously excluding prepping time), so the actual building/material making time was really fast.
Here's what it currently looks like:

So, after a good day, must come a bad day - or days for that matter...

Tuesday & Wednesday were so slow, I could have made another level in the same time frame! Obviously I'm joking, but I'm completely serious about how ridiculously slow the progress has been across these two days.

I only managed to polish off/refine some bits and bobs, put some sounds in the 'collectible blueprint', and make a couple more emissive textures. The rest of the time was spent watching over Dom as he tried to get the level functioning properly - not helping technically, just reassuring that the logic is there behind whatever magic he is doing in the blueprint editor.

Following into the next day, I was looking around the 'Dark World' level for optimisation opportunities, cleaning up here and there. Unfortunately, we only saved a couple of frames, and it looks as if one of the only things that is guaranteed to increase our frame rate is to lower the overall resolution... Which is definitely not ideal!

There is however another sure way of improving the FPS... Landscape. I realised on Wednesday night that we are using much more landscape than is actually needed, and therefore, wasting frames. This will be something for next week to do just to optimise it a bit more.

On Thursday, I had to scan in all of my life drawing to go through later on that night and put together a collage of 10-20 images ready to hand in on Friday. So, that took up a good hour of my time.
I moved onto looking for inspirational images/places that I could use to base a personal project on.

I stated in my extended writing that I wish to either re-make a game environment, or film scene in Unreal Engine 4, but it appears to be that finding an actual place in the real life to base my models/textures on would be a really cool idea too. At the end of it, I could have an environment of a real life scene in a game setting, enabling me to have a before and after comparison - really good for a portfolio if done well.

I really want to do something like this, I just need to find something to base it off of:

Or, base my project from a real-life scene/highly recognisable/memorable place. For example, Infinity Ward replicated some of the places in Chernobyl:

I would just really love something like this in my portfolio as I think it would be nice to see the comparison of real-life to game.

In terms of the level, little progress was made, but definitely well needed progress. The problem of switching between level was fixed, but the saving data for what exactly the player has done/completed in the normal level needed to be transferred to the Dark World and back whenever the player enters the rabbit hole.

For example, if the player collected two tarts, then entered the rabbit hole, that data needs to be saved, transferred, and then when you come back, determine what two tarts the player picked up so that they don't respawn when the level loads again. Or, the player might half complete the Rabbit quest, then decide to go into the rabbit hole, complete the quest for the Hatter, then come back and finish the Rabbit one. They can now pretty much do as they will, and the blueprints keep track of what you have and haven't completed/collected.

Pick up the tart & go through the rabbit hole.

Keeps count of the tarts when in the Dark World

Keeps track of the tart that I picked up before entering, and doesn't spawn it again.

Started the rabbit quest as you can see in the top left, but not finished it.

You can still go back through and complete the quest without re-doing it all again.

This is a much more text-heavy blog than usual, but that's because there isn't as much visuals that have changed since last week.

This is the list of things & odd bits which I personally need to fix between now and the DMU deadline:

Normal World:
-Bridge collision needs fixing
-Play sound when eating/drinking
-Fence around Hatter area
-Move butterflies at start down
-Cull the red pansies
-Chamfer edge of path boarder stumps
-Delete flowers out of flower bed
-Delete landscape components
-Change lightmass volume

Dark World:
-Use exponential height fog instead of loads of particle emitters
-Change emissive colour on water
-Delete landscape components
-Change lightmass volume
-Delete extra unwanted lake planes

There are other little things which will make it more polished, but these are the main ones. Over the weekend I need to add some stuff to our written document, and look into more refined sounds and making the landscape material blend better with the different textures.