Jon's IDM Blog

Week 10/11 Setting up Level, Level Streaming & VR

Things have been really crazy lately but big strides have been being made, the looming crunch is approaching but I think things will work out. Pouring in so many hours I kinda forgot to post on my process blog! During week 10 I finally got a chance to do what I'm better at and put together a cool looking level. I was thinking of doing some sort of norse themed building since I had the idea of using the Bifrost to travel to the nine realms. We're up to 9 members now by the way! I was able to grab a building kit from the Unreal Store and piece together a cool looking grand hall. I wanted to make it feel big but not too empty so I went ahead and made a second level which required a bunch of stairs. After getting all that together I had to go back to the tech grind and my level streaming device working. I decided to kind of have it centralized and have the users be able to cycle through the worlds which triggered a portal that I put together to send you to the world. It took a bunch of programming that I'm not very good at so that was quite the challenge, in the end it came out pretty nicely. I then went on to grab the Sci-fi level I made last semester for a world to travel to and I was quite happy when it worked out.

I thought I was out of the woods after figuring this stuff out but it turns out that when you switch from using a standard avatar to using VR controls, you get replication issues when traveling to the server so I've been working on figuring out solutions for that. Luckily I've found some projects that specialize in VR multiplayer so I think I should be able to extract some answers there. My main objective right now is that everything functionally works in vr multiplayer, once I'm able to get over this hurdle I should be pretty solid. I want to setup name inputs and make sure voice channels work but I think the framework I got helps take care of that for me. Then as long as everyone gives me their level by next week I should be good, after that will just be icing on the cake... hopefully, as long as there's no other technical hicups.

Social Calendar

I haven't had much time to socialize normally but I did put in an hour and a half on Tues and Wed to just take a break and play some cards and a game with my one friend. Most of my digital socializing recently has been meetings and project work. I have been trying to keep up with messages with my team to make sure they don't get stuck too much. I found that putting together little videos of myself doing stuff in UE4 has been the easiest way to show people how to do things rather than trying to setup meetings or type things up. I do things like show how to navigate the material editor, make doors open, migrating stuff to different levels, how to setup perforce and more.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FyqUghQTcqmsXK7Z6PyAaiC5E9_qiriu/view?usp=sharing

level streamer demo

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDZrGuruFusAu3-UFc53Cc-n6qV9sRbd/view?usp=sharing

perforce tutorial

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12q0rhKh4wnElZ4gupKRgPnArKME9UJrW/view

migrating levels

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12d9gidCXvfXF9eXbKtmuvdvOh5xa7Wir/view

setting up doors

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CGp9AKzDILURsdOf7Yh7-bOqc3jDxBr2/view

using material instances

home

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