Happy New Year to you all.
This update is the biggest so far, from a new fish flocking system to the creation of a new main character.
WHAT'S NEW: 1. The new main character, Laguna 2. New optimized full AI fish flocking system. 3. New fish/creatures, Turtle and Sardines. 4. Animations
Laguna
Laguna was first sculpted then retopo'd in Blender. This model took 3 days to design and model in which major changes to the model took place every day and these changes can be seen on my youtube channel. As the model was modeled it was time to add it into UE4. During this time I created shaders for this model to liven up the aesthetic of this model and also give Laguna a personality.
SHADERS
Breathing Tube Shader
Here is how I created the flashing breathing tube material shader in unreal. I had to add 1.1 after the sine function instead of 1, otherwise the flashing would transition to material to black and I didn't want it to do that.
Wetsuit Shader
This is the shader material I created for the wet suit over time it creates a radial wave near where the player is looking. I created an offset on the Y axis so the radial effect would come down from top of the screen to the bottom no matter the orientation of Laguna's wetsuit.
Both of these shaders are viewable in my video below.
FISH FLOCKING AI
I've been working on this part of the update since Update 1.3, as I was watching the Abzu GDC talk again I was thought, what if I did it my fish system like how the amazing creators of Abzu did? So I started to, I created this fish system using Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh which helps with the performance of the game greatly as it makes only one draw call for all the fish model, unlike my other system. But now that I've made this discovery I can greatly improve the other Fish system I have. So the pros of this new system is that I can spawn in 1000 fish and have it run above 60fps; its not until I reach the 4000 mark the fps starts going below 60fps and at 10k it runs at 18fps, this is due to the fact I have not currently optimized the models to take usage of the LOD system in Unreal.
VIDEO
WHAT'S NEXT?
The next update I will have the Fish AI flocking sytem completed and a storyline for the game.
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