Magic Dog

     Ultimately at the end of the day, I don't know shit.      Did I render this right in Unreal 5? The short answer is... no.     Anyways... What am I doing? Yeah? Right? - I think the big thing is, I haven't figured out a way to build everything from scratch. One of my biggest gripes about the unreal 5 engine, is the fact I cannot start with a completely blank project. It comes with a sun, baked lighting, some cool other effects, and a bunch of default settings I am not going to use. I spend HOURS wondering why everything looked extremely high contrast and saturated - which I found out was caused by the camera deciding to auto expose itself. If this was the real world, AWESOME, I would love a camera that corrected lighting and made it easier to see. But for a video game? No, this isn't going to work. Well, it's not going to work for me . Did Paper Mario have this intense of lighting? No. So, me trying to delete things without making the fun...

Unreal has overwhelmed me. There is a lot to learn, and a lot of good practices I am trying to be mindful of. I am not giving up. But, I am feeling greatly overwhelmed. While a normal amount of feeling overwhelmed is normal, this feeling of overwhelmingness is strong. Programing, Rendering, Lighting, Shadows, and Cameras... its all soooo much. I think part of it is that I have a lot of engrained habits that are hard to break, and Unreal is so vastly different than anything I have worked with. It also doesn't help, that Unreal is complex. While I am learning a lot, I fear that my brain is retaining very little as I find myself revisiting the computer and wondering what the hell I did the night before.

I just learned about Pixel bleed. See that greenish line? You cab even see where I cut the tile in the middle and where the door itself is a separate tile. Its not good! Yeah. Turns out... I can't be doing my tiles like this...      See how my bricks touch empty space? Causes bleed. I need to seperate my tiles. So they bleed into themselves. It may require more tilesets to be created, but its likely to be the best method.      I am going to need to develop an organizational system for this. Likely: Tileset_CityHouse_Roof.png as an example.      I wrote all this on the toilet. I wasn't feeling good. But this helped.

Turns out I don't know anything about texturing in the slightest. This house looks realitively normal. Then I ruined it.

  I really don't know what I am doing.     Every time I think I am getting closer to figuring out Unreal, the less sure I am. See how the trees don't cast shadows on themselves or on other trees? Yeah, I don't know what I am doing wrong either. With Unity or Godot, it was as easy as putting it in there and switching the rendering to transparent, but Unreal doesn't think like that. Not to mention this default project has so many lighting and camera effects going on, I am curious if that's the reason its not working as believed.     Well... time for more experimentation. Oh yeah... and maybe I need to upgrade that graphic's card.

    I have been feeling better mentally as of late. I am enjoying working on the video game, but these beginning stages create a lot of headaches. My lack of knowledge makes it difficult to understand what I need, and perhaps I might require some more traditional learning first before tackling such a huge project. It doesn't help that the software I have been using, Unity, is causing problems for my work.     Unity was going to be the program I chose to work on this game, in fact, everything  I have been doing shader wise, has been done in Unity. I fully understand the work I have already done is minor, and I am at the stage in game development where this is the best time to switch platforms. For those who don't understand what is going on, Unity announced a couple days ago that they were increasing their prices for their licence. Due to inflation, this price increase was expected, companies have to make profit and Unity is no different, so that aspect was full ...