Hi. I’m a random game developer who did a bit of complaining on twitter and @UnrealEngine reached out to me. I was impressed with that, so I’m here to ask a few questions. I’ve got a pretty solid base for my game built in Unity already. I’m actually in the process of putting together a kickstarter campaign with the material I have. I’m trying to get this done fairly quickly because I’ve got some fairly major life changes coming up and I want to get my kickstarter campaign live before I move across country. I realize switching to Unreal before that is highly unlikely and would require the skills of people I can’t afford at the moment. That’s fine. If my kickstarter is funded, then I’ll look at switching to Unreal Engine. Anyway, I have some questions.
I realize that one doesn’t HAVE to write everything in C++ anymore and can just use blueprints. That’s good for me because I don’t know C++ and it’d likely take me the better part of another year to become familiar enough with it where I would be confident in the code I’m writing. I don’t have time for that. What are peoples’ opinions on using Blueprints and what’s the learning curve like? I’ll be honest, I’ve never dived very deep into any node-based system like this. It looks a bit like Blender’s node editor. Am I correct in making that assumption?
In Unity, it’s very easy to import a heightmap to define the contours of a terrain. It looks like there are similar systems in Unreal but they look far more complex than what I’m used to. That’s fine, I can handle complex, but I’d like to hear from someone who’s maybe used both Unity’s terrain engine and Unreal’s to kinda give me an idea of the differences and just how much more complicated it is. Is that at all possible?
Something I’ve yet to implement, but it’s on the list is multiplayer floating origin. I’m building a HUGE world and WILL encounter floating point errors if I don’t implement floating origin to keep things a reasonable distance from 0,0,0. Are there any Unreal-specific references I can utilize or will that need to be written from scratch? I was already planning on hiring someone more experienced than myself for that anyway… and that’s part of the reason I’m here. It seems to be remarkably difficult to find Unity developers who are experienced at anything but small-scale mobile development. I’m hoping I can find some developers in the Unreal community who are more interested in making AAA PC games.
Finally, if anyone’s interested in what I’m actually doing, I’m making a multiplayer pirate sandbox game with some gameplay mechanics no one’s seen in this type of game before. The survival genre has brought some fantastic concepts to the world of game development and I intend to refine those elements into something new and exciting and engaging while ditching the tedious pieces of that genre (… like survival… sorry survival game creators, it’s just not my thing :). Players will be able to form a crew with a captain and chain of command. That crew will be able to sail the seas, do battle with other ships, make landfall, build a pirate stronghold and defend it and expand territory to gain access to new resources. Players will be able to raid ancient native ruins while overcoming traps and other pirates, as well. I’ve got a lot of really fun, interesting, new things that I want to do with this game and I think Unreal Engine is probably going to be the best way to go, but I want to get some perspective of what I’m getting into.
Here’s a couple raw, unpolished screens if anyone’s interested in seeing them. These have no camera effects or anything applied, so they don’t look as good as they will in the final product. I’m also lacking in character models and custom ship designs, at the moment. My artist is hard at work on them, though! Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your opinions.