We’ve been busy working on all aspects of Abatron. Our concept artist, Rod, dove into Substance Painter during the holiday and did a mass retexturing. We decided to just go ahead and re-texture the old game models. This lets us do several things:
Get people playing our game faster
Get more practice using our new texturing programs
Let us nail down any last minute changes for the new design after player’s feedback
Eventually, all the buildings will be remodeled to our new Haagenti theme. For now, it allows us to better use our time by focusing more on balancing game play instead of perfecting the visuals of everything at once.
Rama and I were thinking of trying a twitch stream in a few weeks. We have lots of fun doing team coding for Abatron, so we thought we’d invite others to join in the fun! =) We’ll post more information on channel name and time, later. We should probably figure out twitch too =)
Thanks! One of our goals is to refocus our art theme to be more consistent across the models for this race of creatures. Our first iteration was all over the place =)
I’m having so much fun with UMG. I have a fully customizable UI system now for Abatron. I’ll have to post a video on this soon. You can Move, Resize, Dock, Zorder, & Collapse windows in game realtime. I’m currently working on saving the preferences from game to game.
Rama has been making an ingame Ai editor. It will allow quick iteration of behavior systems and make it accessible to anyone playing the game. We are already having tons of fun with it.
Here is a video showing the UMG system for the RTS mode. Its been a roller coaster
These AbatronFrames can support any content layout. It required alot of work but I’m really happy with the result.
-Moveable
-Dockable
-Zorder
-Resizable
-Collapsible
-Fade out, configurable
-Change the Docking direction
-Resettable
-Save & load your preference file the Game.ini
-Changeable Layout States
-Future update will have sticky windows
Hi Devero, a huge fan of Abatron and your content packs in the Marketplace. Your near OS-GUI functionality demo with UMG is very promising. AbatronFrames looks very close to a GUI Creation System (In-Game). With network support it could be a collaborative GUI Creation System? Now that would be a interesting Application. You have just inspired me to develop a in-game Editor App for all the content in my game. Keep up the awesome work!
Thanks Techlord! I look forward to seeing what you do
Speaking of In-game editor, one day Rama will show off his in-game Ai editor he is making for Abatron. Its pretty cool and I think hardcore RTS fans will like it. =)
Any chance of a marketplace release for AbatronFrames or something similar? It looks generic enough to be useful in a lot of situations. I hadn’t really thought about it, but after watching your video on AbatronFrames, UMG stuff will probably become a pretty popular in the marketplace.
Thanks Syntaks, I would totally put these frames on the marketplace. I just have to wait a bit longer for some fixes to the current version of UMG. I currently had to add a couple lines of c++ to get the data I need. Additionally, there is a bug in the engine that is calling deprecated code to crop the userwidgets which doesn’t respect render transforms which I had to modify. After those things get sorted in a future engine version, I will be able to put it on the marketplace.
Our first official video showing off our current work in Abatron.
A little long, but its long overdue =). The team did great work putting this together. I couldn’t ask for a better team, now only if they could Alt+Drag to duplicate themselves!
Who is this trailer meant for? The end consumer? I ask because much if it feels like showing off features implemented in UE4 rather than something that would really interest a gamer. An example of this is unit selection. I think you spend too much time in the demo selecting units and placing structures. That’s a cool thing to have implemented in UE4- but a standard thing in rts games for years now.
I would cut this trailer in half. Show things that make it impressive, or show potential for fun. Don’t show a lot of UI. People don’t get turned on by UI unless it’s a spaceship game. Do show the energy vortex thing, units beating each other up. Show the correlation between the rts mode and the tps mode. How does that work? Why is that cool? Can you show that?
Finally, throw some titles in there “4 player multiplayer!” Give us information about the game. Give a tiny bit of background “in a distant galaxy the war for resources wages on…” Or whatever.
Our intent was to show some of the RTS features applied in UE4. It was more targeted to other devs showing hey you can do RTS styles with this engine. However, you were right that we might of focused too much time on the selection process, hehe. Sometimes you get blinded by your own creations and just want to show off the smallest of details. =)
We’ll make sure to gear future videos towards gameplay and build up excitement!
