TIL: Learn to Code in C++ by Developing Your First Game (Section 4, Lectures 94-98)

OK, time to shake the dust off of my Unreal skillz. As you may know, Gears of War 4 (the project I’ve been employed to work on for the past year and a half) has been (pre)released! I’m pleased with the amount that I learned working on that game, and am happy to finally have a completed game on my résumé. But I’ve also moved onto a new role at a little company called “BioWare”. Which means that if I’m going to keep my Unreal knowledge from getting rusty, I’ve got to continue to find time to work with it in my off hours. Hence the reason I’m up at 5:30AM on a Saturday resuming my studies with Udemy (and why it’s taken me more than 24 hours to find the time to finish less than 40 minutes of tutorial watching).

So, for any of you folk reading this who aren’t me… I’m aware that this is counter to what a blog should be used for… I’m taking notes for myself. I want to be able to scan this stuff later when I want to remember something… so if the notes are useful to you, great… but I’m not just republishing a tutorial here.

The first couple of lectures here are basic talking about what the project is: a tank fighting game.

96. Setting Up a GitHub “Repo”

– Talks about setting up a GitHub repository for the project.
– I chose to skip this. I’ve no intention of sharing this project with other people, and am fine with using OneDrive to back up my files through perforce… so… hopefully that doesn’t come back to bite me later.
– I’ve already set-up a new folder in perforce, and spent a chunk of time setting up the folder structure so that I can just continue using the same workspace. This means I only need the one .p4ignore file.
– I’m using U4 13, and there’s a new visual studio update.. so.. let’s dive in, I guess.

97. Creating & Deleting Landscapes

– Landscapes use 1/6 storage of Static Mesh
– Support LOD & streaming
– Up to 8k heighmaps
– works well with mini-maps

Iteration will go:
world -> character -> controls -> player 2 -> ui -> world -> repeat

First Check-in is done now with a clean slate.

98. Landscape Setup and Scaling

– 32×32 is the max number of components
– small tile sizes make complex geometry that isn’t very large as it’s capped how many squares you can have
– if a cube is put in the scene, 1 in scale means the cube is 1 meter.. but landscapes are weird mixes of scale/section size/resolution
– this scene is too big to handle lighting without a “lightmass importance volume