A new enemy typ is almost done.
Needed to simplify the dismember system a little so it works without problems and fit more a statue like enemy.
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Iâm still working on the environment.
The wooden parts a very high poly and only polypainted, so no textures used for this.
But the high details come with a heavy price, the nanite verts ~ 2Mill & ~ 3 Mil, compression size is around 20 Mb & 30 Mb.
Just finished a new set of rigged flying enemies for a level test.
Not so happy with the glow, i want to see clear what is coming but i noticed this is really to much and looks kinda strange at some of the models.
Edit:
Here is also a video with an short animation test.
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A short debug test how hard it would be to have Projectiles hit a certain target component.
It is basicly a test how hard it would be to target a certain player with a 2 player co-op game mode.
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Love how all the edges are rounded, looks very natural that way. It actually looks very comfy 
haha. With the skulls etc in the scene I suppose itâs intended to be spooky though. The lighting setup makes the difference here. Would like to discuss that but maybe this is how you intend the scene to be.
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No this scene just use the lights the way they do to see if i can get away with a single texture for the whole wall. Also to make it more visible because i di show this in forums to get some feedback.
Really not meant to look this way. Would love to hear ideas and talk about this.
what do you have in mind? Iâd probably light up scene details partially or one by one (both to draw attention to individual parts of the scene and to not give away the entire scene immediately). Other space could be dark. Like⌠lighting up the candles when you get close to them, or placing a candle inside a skull then lighting it up briefly before the scene goes dark are ways to draw attention to certain places and feelings. You can do that with lighting or by grouping things (by color, shape, similarity etc.). If you show everything at once it can be overwhelming (âtoo many details, where do I look?â) or reduce the spooky vibe because people can see the layout of the room instantly.
Besides that lighting helps draw attention to specific details (or hides them from you), it can create that spooky feeling. Somethingâs only spooky if you donât know what is going to happen. Thatâs probably why I feel comfy in the room with skulls, because I already know skulls are not going to run after me and eat me or⌠is there a chance they might? This fear of the unknown thing is what makes it spooky to play RE7 until you know the enemies, their moves, what happens around what corner, when thereâs no longer fear of the unknown. A lot of random factors and low chance events to turn what the player learnt upside down can definitely help. Shifts in layout and lighting and such will also help for a replay.
There is also commonly a change from spooky to comfy and back to spooky (RE safe house) which can help people from getting too stressed out (too spooky, dead space to new players) and boring (itâs not intense for too long). Instead of going on one average level all the way it appears shifting from one to another and back is effective.
Then thereâs the factors which cause discomfort in a good way (a spooky way). Those are details of places. Like huge open areas (or dark walls), or everyday places where something is âoffâ (an office with no people, a sunny park with no animals). Details can of course also be sound based. When lighting based, you could hide those walls on the side or implement this really low chance event to play with shadows.
Iâm saying âreally low chance eventâ because overdoing things has the opposite effect. When people realize that thereâs a sound playing but never an enemy when itâs heard, it has a negative effect. Or, when you do something like play paranormal events like amnesia, certain events (the poltergeist, opening and closing drawers at random etc.) has been done too often in other projects.
Pareidolia is also a fun way to get spooky stuff. Thatâs the effect people get when they look at something and think they see something that isnât really there. (faces on fabric, cloud animals). People create their own details especially when they recognize patterns in a hard to see area.
Sometimes itâs spooky to not show anything at all. Movies and games often hide what the danger actually is for as long as possible. I liked how this was done in âIt Followsâ, that movie where âsomethingâ is only visible to one person and will continue to follow that person 24/7 in the form of a walking human. Just walking directly towards that one person wherever he / she is constantly. You get to see early on that whatever that danger is takes a human form, but they never ever tell you what it is or what its real abilities are. They remain unknown (spooky!). This creepyness is very hard to do these days with say a zombie because people are familiar with them (they are slow and you hit them in the head right?).
Spooky can also be achieved by limiting the player (having few supplies, restricting movement, restricting where you can save the game, restricting vision, removing weapons) but this can either lead to a very intense (good) experience or a major annoyance. Annoying situations are like the darkness in Doom 3, the bad controls on SH1, The creatures knocking you down for X seconds in SH3, the emptiness or actually enemy swarmed areas in FO New Vegas.
When I made Road To The North I decided to turn the playerâs expectations upside down close to the end of the story. Spooky to some, annoying to some 
. Players had prepared for a very dangerous journey (taking gear and weapons with them) and and up captured in a room, without that gear. While sh"t hits the fan outside (people outside the cell can be heard being slaughtered), the player is no longer powerful and has to come up with a quick plan other than shooting their way out. What is outside that cell, is the unknown .
Thatâs some things that popped up in my mind, mostly about the lighting and going a tiiiiny bit offtopic on the same topic of spooky
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Really lot´s of cool ideas, thank you. WIll read this later again. Just about to create a actor to activate and deactivate animations, physics, lights and particles.
MegaLights is still experimental and even it would not be, it needs lumen active and this drops about 10 fps. In the Demo i only use 1 Light and the rest is done with emissive lights. Was the most performant way, but this light can´t cast shadows sadly.
As you said use lights candles and stuff only if needed or walk by is a great idea 
. Will test how i can do this then to have this spoky flair.
This was so strange as i played the first Unrel game. There was a room that shuts down the lights and the enemies came. This inspired me to do this in the demo when you walk into the dark room. Just the other way around
The movement of the game itself is just to fast to build up such moments more easy, even if i already did a slower aproach for such a game.
Here is a short video. Basicly testing enemy spawnpoints and speed/lenght of a level.
You gave me much things to think about, alway good to hear great ideas, thank you again. Will come back to this later again.
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hmmm I donât think slow pace is a bad things for building up the tension. Thatâs just preference of course, itâs a fast action type game . Like when I watch a movie and a song is played I even like it when they take the time to play the entire song. Like⌠that scene in Pulp Fiction where they played Al Greenâs Let Stay Together. I think that created the right balance, having fast scenes some of the time and slow other times.
What Iâve noticed is that speed in Die To Survive seems to be caused by (walking speed, enemy speed, enemy distance, the amount of actions the player needs to perform). It can actually move from slow pace to very fast when an enemy appears in front of you. Itâs good. I only wonder if the walking speed is going in the right direction (goes from snail to supercar at times) Then I wonder, how much of atmosphere is lost at fast pace (environment sounds, immersion etc.).
Supercar turn and run on the spline:
For example, would it be more immersive if the walk speed is low, allowing the player to really listen to the environment, then pick his own actions âI hear a sound from the left, look leftâ or âI donât hear anything, letâs rush forwardâ with all the consequences. The game would probably still be at high speed like that, while reducing the forward run speed over the main spline.
Oh! I also wonder what the requirements would be for Praydogâs mod to inject VR onto Die To Survive. Probably he h"cks the bone system of the default mannequin skeletal mesh, or the default camera. Wonder if VR players like me could run this in VR with that h"ck. I suppose you could already test it XD Iâd love it. On your side you wouldnât have to implement the VR libraries. And Iâm a huge fan of ironsight aiming in VR. just a suggestion . I figured out how to do ironsight aim using the default mannequin and a camera center position do generate IK for the g"n, shooting accurately from barrel transform as well. If you ever want to go that route Iâd give you the files.
How is your game progression event system set up? I made (and sell) a subsystem that collects info as text strings (âhas_done_x, has found_key, arrived_at_door_1â etc.). Specialized components react to when that info collection changes and run their own methods for preconfigured combinations (has info X and Y, but not Z). Could be really useful to implement your level progression programming.
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Yes, just to calm down a little between action. This is where i use longer distances of movement for.
But manipulating the movement speed as you mentiont to create this could be better for building up tension.
As you noticed i build the movement system of the player to move on a spline. Basicly i have full control over movement and turn speed. But somehow this gets broke at some point and i could not figure out what caused this (the downside of upgrading the base UE version). I put this on hold and wanted to have a look into this again after finishing a next testbuild.
Do not know what this is, but i was already getting VR hardware to test this. But also put this on hold for now.
Thank you for telling me you have such a system. But this was one of the first things i did to track what happens. I changed it later to store and save the data for a history the player can look at later.
I looks basicly like this, i almost store and save all what happens.
After all this time there is still sooooo much to think about and to do/change 
You gave me a lot to think about, thank you. As i said before, always good to have differnt views at such a project, this helps to evolve and make it hopefully even better
Edit:
Just noticed at the link, this is a whole event Mgr System, this is what i created for the player. I even naed it this way 
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That thing adds VR to any Unreal Engine game released in the past even if the developers did not implement VR themselves. Itâs a hack tool that works really well. He also made the VR mod for the REFramework. Could make your development process easier, not âofficiallyâ implementing VR but setting up the game so that the VR mod works (itâs likely to just work already).
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Ah ok i see, what i noticed was i need to activate a plugin within the engine. That´s why i did not test it till now really. Just with another test project.
For developing VR with the engine yes, if you use the hack tool then no. That runs on a released game without VR code in it.
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Sounds nice, will give it a try soon, thank you for the info.
Edit:
Was just looking at this âPraydogâs mod to inject VRâ seems like at the moment up to UE 5.4 i am on 5.5. But i will test this later again.
I did a test to have a more noticable effect. I think something like this helps to have up and downs. I also bet this way people will lok instant at this points. A bit to much but i think you can see the idea behind it.
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YES! Thatâs a great way to introduce those enemies too. New players will be like "oooh sh"t, if they survive that fire they will be difficult, ooooh sh"t itâs a swarm ". Somehow reminded me of those introductions in like Dead Space and Half Life where you get such idea by seeing a new enemy for a short time before it appears in combat.
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I now also tried to have the player look at certain points i want them to pay attention.
I think works pretty good.
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