Of Engine Changes, Forests and Bug Bashing – Weekly Update #17

Back home and on the PC again and it’s been a hell of a productive couple days.

Let’s start at the beginning – I know, a revolutionary thought 😉

I (mostly) fixed the issue with the dark trees, that received too much shadowing from fully masked out mesh sections. But first, I had to swap to a source version of the engine because the fix required a little engine change.

I wrote a little guide if you are interested: Moving to a Source Version of Unreal Engine 5

Once that was setup, I added a new tick box to mesh sections in a static mesh to completely exclude them when creating distance fields.
There is already a tickbox to exclude them from distance field lighting, but that did not do the trick entirely, sadly.

So the Global Distance Field before I added my change to exclude the snow mesh section looked like this

And after my change it looks like this – which is more akin to what the same tree without any snow mesh section looks like.

But the proof of the pudding is, of course, how it is affected by lighting, and there is a definite improvement. Even if it is not quite 100% the same as on the tree without any snow mesh section (on the right), it’s close enough that I am happy with it for now.

So now that that is deemed good enough for this moment, I tested it all in anger and got onto making some nice lush forests.

I also added the first and purposely run down version of the farmers garden to the players homestead – ready to be cleaned up and filled with plants 🌿✨ (and then later upgraded to a more fancy pancy version 😉)

And then lastly I took a big attack on bugs this week and bashed them tight into oblivion 😁 Here are some details on it if you are super interested.

• Fixed character and camera rotation when interacting with objects
• Improved Movement and Player Control Behaviour
  • It’s now much more responsive and impossible to get into unwanted camera angles
• Fixed missing Animation Blueprints in a cooked build
• Fixed crash when loading from Character Customisation into Main Level
• Fixed tilled plots not using the correct material
• Fixed one of the buildings flipped normal on a wall and moved balcony further into main building to avoid a hole and draftiness – it’s cold outside after all.. brr.

And now I better get back to it, so we get this game done and out the door 😁Have a lovely week out there!