Demo401 Progress Plan

Hello everyone, Derek here,

As many of you would have seen in the latest video update put together by our incredible creative director, James Penca, he teased a look at the latest progress plan. This is a plan I put together to keep track of my own progress in Demo401 as I continue reworking spaces for V1.5.

(Quick note. Areas coloured in aren't necessarily physically explorable. For example, the forecastle and well deck cannot be accessed by the player, but are mostly visible from other areas.)

I figure I'd give a quick technical explanation, so here we go.

The red colour are spaces that only got a quick light build so far. This is essentially V1.4 lighting rebuilt with the new settings for V1.5. This is also where I set up the light blocker levels, which are debug levels attached to individual spaces for lightbuilding purposes. Those levels include all adjacent levels that might affect the lighting of the desired level (such as by bouncing or blocking lighting), and it also utiliizes cube blockers to improve blocking and reduce artifacts. 

The advantage of using light blocker levels is that the adjacent levels can be built with extremely low lightmap resolutions, so there is little wasted time light baking meshes that you will simply discard.

The orange stage is where I spend most of my time working on. This step involves bumping up the lightmap resolutions by approximately 250%, and then manually even out the resolutions on each mesh until they are close to equal, and everything turns mostly green in the lightmap debug view. Additionally, any meshes with UVs that are warped require the "Full UV precision" setting to be enabled manually on each affected mesh.

Once the orange stage is complete, we move on to the yellow stage, which is a fairly quick process of optimization, plus some tweaks to the lighting and collision if required. Most of the optimization at this stage is memory and loading related.

Finally, the build gets packaged up and sent to our QA team, which thoroughly tests each area for collision issues and visual glitches. There is a final update pass that I complete in order to fix the issues that were discovered during this testing process, but then they are set aside ready for public release of V1.5!

Things are progressing at a good pace at the moment, and the light is now at the end of the tunnel. V1.5 will be the best and most expansive recreation of the Titanic that we've done to date, and I can't wait for all of you to try it.

-Derek Verveer
Unreal Engine Lead