Just a bit of fun… I needed a break from dev =P
Yay, it’s new video night 
Lots of bugs/glitches/optimization to fix but, some major functionality up and going!
2 Likes
Aight, for my next trick I will figure out how to do a nice ocean material
Shouldn’t be too hard as long as epic doesn’t do anything bizarre like removing tessellation from the engine…
4 Likes
Aight, made a start…
2 Likes
Why hello there
Was just having an interesting conversation with someone who asked if I was still working on this planet thingy cos it looked pretty great but I hadn’t posted anything for almost a year. The answer is yes… but… it’s been stalled pretty badly this year because it still uses the PMC (Procedural Mesh Component) which is struggling more and more as I add new features.
The good news is that I just got back from UnrealFest 2023 on the Gold Coast here in Oz where I learned that you can indeed generate meshes at runtime with the new dynamic mesh stuff (I was mistakenly thinking that it was editor only) and that apparently it’s waaay faster than PMC (Thank you sooo much to the awesome Ben Carnall).
So just now, I came up with a cunning plan…
If some of you lovely people want to help me figure out how to generate a basic subdivided plane in C++ at runtime with the new dynamic mesh stuff, I’ll swap the old code out for that then put the whole system online at github for anyone and everyone for free.
Truth be told, I gave up on the idea of selling this as a plugin ages ago… the only reason I haven’t open sourced it on github already is cos of the poor performance with the PMC.
1 Like
Hey Everyone,
Long time no see
Managed to clean out a bunch of long standing issues in the project this weekend, but hit a bit of a brick wall with performance for the procedural mesh component.
Put a timer around (just) the bit that copies vertices into procedural mesh components to get more info, turns out UE5 needs up to 30-40 ms to update the verts in just four of these (they’re subdivided planes each with 64x64 vertices). That’s enough to put a noticeable snag in the frame rate when you’re flying around.
So to soothe my frustration I thought I’d take a break and try a completely different approach just for gits and shiggles using WPO based displacement. I’m just using a single noise node in the material below, but the results are… interesting…
1 Like
So cool.
Keep up the great work!
Hey, I stumbled across this while trying to figure out some stuff indirectly related to the project and somebody linked here. I was wondering if you’re still working on these projects and if you ever made them publicly available. What you’ve shared is incredible and the amount of time and work you’ve put into this is truly inspiring. It would be a shame for it to disappear and I would honestly love to experience this first hand even without any game attached to it, the galaxies/nebulae are so beautiful and what you’re able to do with the planets I can’t even begin to describe how amazing it is.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this, I’m still in the beginning of my Unreal journey and this is showing me that no matter what I wish to create in the engine, with time, effort and perseverance it can be done. I’ll probably be revisiting this post just to remind myself of that every now and again.
Thanks for the response, I’ll be sure to try other places if there’s no reply soonish.
It’s a shame that the forums are dying off, they’re such a great place to see the history of Unreal and its community and it would be sad if the history made now and in the future was simply lost because it’s locked away or left behind on some obscure site.
Oh hey there fellow necromancers 
Popped back to find some old notes from the thread and noticed there were a few questions I’d missed. game_maker is quite right, my musical misadventures have not left much time this year for further work on eden sorry 
Having said that, the real problem is that I just couldn’t get enough performance out of the procedural mesh component to push up to a stable 60fps. Things sort of go ok if I don’t try to do any collision, but as soon as turn on collision even on the smallest octave, the frame rate craters to under 10fps.
I did tests where I basically removed any random height stuff and just did simple math that did a flat sphere and it hardly made any difference suggesting that the issue was with the actual mesh generation not my random noise calculations.
I tried so hard to get my head around runtime mesh component as an alternative (it’s much faster) but I just couldn’t figure it out, and the “documentation” for it is more of mean joke than a guide.
I still play with planet stuff occasionally cos it annoys the P out of me that I spent so many years on it and never finished, but when I do I use voxel plugin now because it means I don’t have to death wrestle with collision anymore, it’s just built in (ironically, VP uses RMC for it’s mesh generation).
I did toy with the idea of releasing my code but tbh with the performance limitations above it didn’t seem good enough to inflict on anyone else…
1 Like