Hello again, Max here. I must first just say that I’ve been slacking with these devlogs. So this week I intend to release at least one more. So the main topic of this devlog will be about my struggle to implement level streaming into the game. I will also go over some post-effects that I worked on.

As mentioned this devlog will focus on:

1. Level Streaming

2. New Post-effects

Level Streaming

After the first playtest we noticed that my level was very laggy at points. Especially in the big library part. I thought this was a bit odd as the level ran smoothly in the editor. We thought that it was because my level was both bigger and more detailed than the first level of the game.

So I started thinking of ways I could optimise my level to make it less laggy in the built version of the game. Some ways a thought about doing this was reduced texture quality. As textures and sounds are among the most demanding assets in file size. However I didn’t have the time to reduce all the textures used in my level so that wouldn’t work.

I then got the idea to use level-streaming instead. By only loading in the relevant parts of a level, the parts visible to the player I could in theory greatly improve the performance.

I didn’t know much about level-steaming so I watched the official Unreal Engine tutorial for them. Turns out they are pretty simple to add/use. You can add sub-levels by just highlighting the objects/assets you want to be in a sub-level. And then in the levels tab press add objects as new level*. You will always have a persistent level and this is where the player spawn and other stuff you don’t want to disappear to be.

The way I did my sub_levels aka the wrong way was to have every room as a new sub-level. This meant I had to have several box triggers to tell the game which sub-levels to be activated at what time. This as you can imagine got a little confusing after some time. At multiple time when I tested the level I would go into a room only to fall through the floor.

New Post-effects

Since last devlog I have been working on some new post-effects you might have even seen them in other devlogs already.

In the final weeks of this project I have been focused on trying to get the game to feel as complete as possible. I will go in more detail in my next devlog. But for now let’s look at my work I did on some post-effects.

My latest post-effect was a “Bloody Screen”-type effect that is linked to the players health-value. I started by creating some new blueprints in both the character and UI to enable this to work together with my post-effect. I can create the effect I wanted by using a bloody-screen png as the base and by increasing its alpha value as the player takes damage. I also added a similar effect to make the world less saturated with color as the player took damage.

As an extra little touch I also added a faint heartbeat sound that get increasingly louder as the player gets closer to death.

I will have some more devlogs up in the coming weeks so look out for that. These devlogs will be more about the project as a whole and not about new features. Anyways see you next time.

//Max Dörper