Hey Galeon, yeah I’m still plugging away at this project. I’ve actually taken a break from it last year, November, December just to clear my head. But otherwise, I’ve been on a bit of an optimizing mission, which already started last year, cleaning up things…etc. Since I’ve learned so much about blueprints and stuff over the last year, I decided to look back into older stuff and make sure it’s not badly done, which in some cases it was and needed replacement and in others, it needed tweaking and optimizing. I guess there’s always gonna be some lingering systems there where it’s just good enough and I can’t replace all of it. But, the game as it stands is in a pretty good place right now, I’m pretty happy with how things are coming together. I think I’m slowly reaching a point where I can move forward again, adding content. Having gone through just about every system to see if I can improve on it and working on the things that really needed it.
I’ve just over the last two weeks or so, done a complete replacement for my camera animation systems. In the old systems I had like 5 blueprints dealing with it. Now there’s only 1 and it’s all fully integrated and the final results of that is pretty cool, I no longer have to worry about possible camera animation overlap popping. when going from one trigger to the next in close proximity. It all just “works”. That’s one of the bigger things I’ve had to do but well worth the effort. Ultimately cheaper system and fully integrated.
Since 4.11 Preview 4 I’ve pretty much moved my project over from 4.10. In the past I would move over with Preview 1 and kinda pay the price for doing that. This time I’ve learned some patience and waited a little longer before making the complete move, having tested it out since Preview 1, I felt like it’s good to go and it’s a fairly clean transition overall, not without it’s problems but deal-able… 
So I wanna test out and possibly make use of capsule shadows. I did a real brief test with Preview 1 and it’s a cool feature. Of course as an optimization I wanna make all my particles use the new vertex lighting, in stead of per pixel. There’s some graphical things I’m going over in general. I think there were some other 4.11 stuff, can’t remember now. Oh, some light channels stuff. Super useful feature. I’ve spent a lot of time with blueprints, but I keep going back with graphical stuff and making small changes and tweaks as well. The game will already look a slight bit different from the demo I released. It’s weird. I just can’t leave it alone… I’ve also gone through and done a huge load of collision optimizations, mainly for AI navigation. I found that their navigation can be kind of expensive and using nav mesh collision made a huge improvement, but it’s highly inaccurate and too easy to see the problems in such a small space. The feature is meant for large world, so it doesn’t work for me. So I made my own collision optimizations, which I would have done anyway, but that sure was the incentive to get it done. It helps a lot if I wanna put like 60 guys in there…
I’m considering posting a video about my new camera animation system. I haven’t posted a new video in a long time and I think this is a good “new” thing to show that I can show it working and also show how it works. It’s harder to make new videos and not feel like it’s a repeat of some sorts. This really isn’t a big project with that many parts to it. I’ve never shown any of my camera systems because I was never happy with them in general. But I think my new system represents pretty much what I’ll have in my game, even if I end up tweaking it in some way, it probably won’t be too much. I don’t really wanna show things I don’t feel represents a real used, working system. Even my player blueprints I showed very early on is still being used pretty much as is, with some tweaks to it, but not to the point of making it very different, just maybe optimizing some sub systems or whatever.
Anyway, sorry you got me rambling on about things… but I guess that’s some current news on my project…