Thank you so much! I still get chills when people from Epic notice, let alone compliment my work.
I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup since there’s a demo-oriented indie meetup on Tuesday that I want to have something playable for. I cut about a gig of unused content from the project folder today (due to my kitchen-sink importing of sample content before the aesthetic was nailed down), and did a lot of reorganization that should help other people navigate once I release the .uproject.
I’m experimenting with a different project structure from the one Epic uses, namely one where the assets are grouped by their in-game function rather than their asset type; For example there is a folder for the drones which contains their base material and mesh, and sub folders for type-specific assets, such as the jammers’ lightning. I figure that organizing by asset type is redundant since filters can already do that for me, and my strategy means that dependencies are far more likely to be clustered together. The disadvantage is that I’m going to have to compromise on assets which are referenced in multiple places, such as handy mask textures.
I further improved the glass effect in ways that might not come across in screenshots but I’ll post some anyway:
The refraction is properly creeping in along the cracks as I intended now. I also switched to a lower res but more dramatic mask texture and made the chroma noise fade in on an exponential curve so that it doesn’t appear until closer to 1 on the intensity scale. The start and end points look the same but the transition is far cleaner and more animated, plus it looks consistent and good for every random value now (before it would sometimes just barf everything out at once).
I’ve also finally gotten around to adding some of the propaganda for the jammer drones! Witness the unfathomable psychomanipulation that future advertising holds for us…
