Tag: ue4

Custom Depth and Custom Depth Stencil in UE4

Ever wondered how to implement occlusion masking in UE4? I wanted this effect for my game – so I spent some time googling and ended up in Post Process material section of Unreal Engine Documentation. You might be too. There is plenty of tutorials about the use of Custom Depth and Custom Depth Stencil Value material nodes on the Internet. I personally find this youtube video quite helpful:

Tom Looman’s tutorials are pretty good too: https://www.tomlooman.com/the-many-uses-of-custom-depth-in-unreal-4/ Read More

Working with Animation Starter Pack in UE4

Animation Starter Pack

While developing a prototype for a new game I am working on right now, I decided to use free assets as much as possible. For animations I found Animation Starter Pack by Epic Games very useful. You probably don’t want to use it in your actual game – but it’s really good for answering a lot of questions about your gameplay. And it is a perfect placeholder for future production-quality animations.

I just finished another iteration of my project where paid a lot of attention to polishing the main character animations. This is how it looks so far: Read More

Implementing a simple behavior tree in Unreal Engine 4

Image displays a level with markers for a neural network

A while ago I started working on a new game project. It’s called Saturday Morning Frag (Let it be SMF for short). Some sort of an arena shooter with bots – that is the idea at the current moment. Anyway, at first, the idea was to employ machine learning™ for bots AI. I was overenthusiastic at that moment. I eagerly started to build layers for my neural network. I haven’t achieved anything significant before I realized that I need to choose: either I am making a game or I am building a neural network. So, I chose the game and switched to UE4 behavior trees.

Today I finished the very first draft version of a bot AI implemented by means of a behavior tree and happy to share what I’ve learned and how you could do something similar. Read More

Unreal Engine C++ course on Udemy by Ben Tristem

There are a few striking differences between Enterprise Software Development and Game Development. I am talking about differences here because at first sight these two things are similar. Both include coding on the same set of languages (C#, C++), both produce software. But this is where the similarities end.

I got used to a methodological approach in developing a software for business. There are a lot of academic researches which goal is just to improve a development process itself. This is where Agile and Scrum came from. This lead to things like CI and CD and Docker, Kubernetes, etc. And this is what Game Development industry has a lack of. For instance, you need a good reasoning for choosing a mono-repository systems to store your source code. But for gamedev industry Perforce is a default tool. Read More