April 18th, 2023 Livestream

Northern Forest / Lake Forest / Dune Desert

https://youtube.com/embed/5NBgetrxtpw?autoplay=1&start=2892&end=3903

Transcript

can also mention I think we mentioned a couple of times but the water the that you see on throughout almost the entire map right like, is probably gonna change as well, this this Lake stuff is like the material is pretty good like that one I think is yeah I think I think this one this there's a couple of places where you can see like a harsh pronunciation between like water and between areas, and like the waterfalls in particular as well I think, they're all placeholders because we have like this new water system that we we're gonna get around to it someday I want to say we I mean Ben because Ben is the one who needs to sort of, shout outs to Ben yeah helps a lot he's got too much [ __ ] on his plate, question from bacon of War are you using procedural foliage or are you placing Shrubbery, By Hand by hand it's all by hands try hard

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a lot of the rocks that you know when people say like a floating Rock are like okay rocks aren't literal foliage they're not trees but, in terms of unreal unreal engine are rocks considered foliage objects they are right so they're part of the foliage system, and and so like I hopefully like there's a bunch of people here hopefully we've seen like how much detail is like in the world I mean I guess you guys have seen that before but you've also seen how there's like, we've seen like a lot of floating slugs other floating rocks because certain assets are deprecated and removed and like there's so many things everywhere hopefully this like the scale of like what we're working with and how many changes there are I think if you take that all into consideration and the fact that there are some rocks that float it's actually a very like quite a good achievement that like we we come across them every now and then considering how many assets you you place yeah we've never we've never been more than two people working in the world yeah, and and also through line, with that how are you guys like I mean it's we have tools of course like it's not by hand as if like I select a tree and I place it and I turn it and I scale it or something we have this like painting tool for which we can kind of set placement rules like between certain scales how how many kind of the the density of them within a specific area, kind of like doing randomization turns so we don't have to tweak everything by hand but we still need to do that kind of painting yeah Everywhere by hand I think again sort of static meshes are placed like that they can demo that yeah can you demo it'd be pretty cool because like it's like a paintbrush that has like a bunch of different foliages that can be painted and it's sort of like in a way procedurally places them as you paint but then you still need to review and make sure that what you're placing is what you want like at the end of the day the tool just helps you place them but it's not as if it's just like a procedurally done by like an algorithm completely, Hana and crew, somewhere empty, okay let's see here if this works, it's been a while since I did this right asks does Santa go home and Landscape who you are to I don't have a yard but I do play The Sims so technically you have a yard then you have a yard in The Sims I absolutely yeah I can show this real quick too because like when you when you talk about Landscaping like the the way that it works is we have like, one mesh which acts as a landscape which is what you're sculpting on so like wait like here for instance, so like if I wanted to have like a plan essentially this is this is beautiful beautiful look they're mirrors this looks exactly like an actual Dune desert right, yeah yeah and then are you watching Hannah taking notes Here Yeah Yeah Yeah I, yeah I'm learning so much from the stream there's there's a bunch of really cool tools here too like this is like the erosion tool where like it fakes what if water was Dripping on top of this and stuff like that, and then we have like sorry no that's a Hider one wait as good as the intern that one one exactly what I want yeah and then there's the ramp thing here we're like wait let me see if I remember to do this you can create like if you wanted to like create a fake ramp rolling up here wait how do you do this you need to like you have to apply it right oh it's different so like if you wanted to have like be able to drive up with a vehicle and you want that flat kind of thing you can do it that way, there's also like if you want this to be like a plateau thing here you can do a flatten yeah sort of like yeah beautiful made a temple yeah and then on top of the landscape you do foliage painting, you can also have landscape painting you can show that off maybe wait it's in a different tab within Landscaping so it's cool oh yeah that's true, and this is this is oh yeah that's a good point actually because like, if you want to paint like where you want to have like a path because the way we've set it up is the landscape is like one big materials essentially and then we have like sort of layers for that landscape so if you want to have like green parts of the thing does it work this way in this I haven't tried it out in the way we set up here, here beautiful right so like yeah you essentially paint what you want the the like what the landscape sort of texture will look like and if you want to have like a path or maybe like some kind of here's a red jungle or something

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, and then you you we have like different ways to like blend them to make it look better because right now I just painting straight on and it kind of looks weird when it's repeating yeah there's there's ways you can but okay so here's one cool thing though with this material is that we have these like small bushes that appear That's part of like the the layer that I just painted on so like those don't need to be placed manually those are like part of the painting process and then depending on how you paint and sculpt, they will appear in different ways right, that's a good that's a good point actually and then we have the the foliage thing of a jig where you pick sort of what assets you want to paint, so like if you want to place a bunch of rocks here maybe if the editor wants to cooperate a lot, chat chat right now are torn between, don't commit and commit git commit and get push forward I mean I think it's it's honestly clear that I'm gonna be out of a job soon because it's not just natural [ __ ] pro at this yeah all right press one if you want snow to commit it too if you wanted to revert what do you what do you think it's still working yeah okay so here's here's I'm like I'm painting the red bushes like where I want them I want them in this overall section yeah so it's kind of like that but then there's like a panel at the side that gives you a bunch of settings that can tell you this to make you control the size of things the density of the placement the rotation etc etc yeah and then like how it's randomized within the brush sort of right yeah because like right now you're just working with like this one red brushes but you can have like your like palette can be like little Bush rock and a tree right and so when you when you paint it paints Bush rocks and trees at whatever density and Etc that you've pre-configured right yeah yeah exactly you can even paint like different assets at the same time although that is kind of risky to do because they don't take into account the placement of the other type of assets so that you'll get a lot of clipping that way okay yeah and then you can also set like density so like if you want I can't remember if it's like the higher you go the the more appear I think it's the other way around yeah yeah so like the lower value density the less show up less dense exactly and then if I go full on one this is what Hannah just mentioned it's just this is like a little chaos Vineyard or something, yeah yeah so just like I guess you you have like a subset of how do you define that do you have like subset of like okay now we're in Titan Forest which means that these this is that subset of assets that I can paint with, yeah we have filters for that in the foliage tool where you can select oh my God you do oh [ __ ] I've never seen this before yeah this is new to me cool wait previously you had to like find every asset myself like every time so this saves me so much effort oh I'm so scared of using this stuff because it might be stuff here that we don't want to show, grass I think is safe yeah maybe we've demonstrated what we need to demonstrate I don't think there's anything in there that's that's, all right there's definitely something here that I don't think, I just noticed, that we don't want to show off, but this one looks fine because there's a bunch of these I can like when I see assets and this zero on the map that's when I get a little bit nervous yeah I mean that's usually deprecated stuff yeah yeah, nothing there's there's no spoilers in there it's just kind of like oh we haven't used this in three years because we don't want it oh for some reason I can't apply the okay stop being a dad oh wow I wish you guys could see this it's like it also has like a sub filter too with like yep cool the subfilters are the biofilters

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, it's like salt water dead specific yeah cool awesome, what was the thing we were talking about before we started doing this [ __ ], well I actually have another question which is sort of relevant to this or a thing to yeah I'm going to talk about, so one other thing that, people run into is indestructible some trees are indestructible right yeah that should be, now is the system for that the same system that it has been for many years that- I made, where you have to, apply the destructible type to certain foliage types right and and so that so the way the way that and it's a weird system and it really is it doesn't really make sense why it needs to be this way, unless you Dive Right In but the way the the way that this works is because these foliage assets are they're all like grouped into one thing and and so so they're it's very hard to physically test what tree is in front of me and you have to do it within the the instance it's kind of weird, and and so the only way to make trees destructible is on their individual foliage types you can see here there's like little bushes, there's like red bamboo trees there's green trees you need to go in each one of those asset types, and you you can apply certain, like, what what are you like settings tags yeah Collision tag kind of thing whatever like certain like objects markers to them basically one of them is whether or not they can be destructive destructible parameters parameters is the work I'm looking for thank you, and and you can also apply like whether or not it can be picked up things like that and so whenever you come across like certain type of tree that should be should be able to be cut down but but it can't be it's because it's missing that tag and again like as you can see there's so many different types of foliage and I think it's not even we can't necessarily just apply it to each different type of foliage because different areas use different collections of foliage and you need to apply them individually to those or something like that so it's very easy to to miss like one thing here and there and then you get one area with one type of tree that can't be cut down anymore, yeah yeah and it's also something like if it's an asset that we're not sure we're gonna keep or if it's an asset that might be used in different areas then we probably don't really change the parameters until we're very certain like how it's going to be used and where it's going to be used and it's kind of, like, probably a big pass that will do kind of once we've wrapped up most of our biomes where we go over all of the assets and make sure all the settings are correct and all the collisions correct and all that kind of stuff so, okay here's a good follow-up question and here why aren't all trees cuttable by default and that that makes perfect logical sense but the way that these foliages work under the hood, intuitively it is how you think but but, like actually in the implementation in Unreal Engine how it works it does that doesn't make sense like because Unreal Engine doesn't know what a tree is there's just foliage right and foliage can be rocks in in terms of unreal how Unreal Engine considers things a foliage can be anything so there's no there's no way to define what is a tree what isn't a tree all we can do is apply foliages to how like palette and paintbrush and then tell Unreal Engine which ones are destructible trees and which ones are collectible bushes or whatever after the fact there's no way to really Define what isn't isn't a tree beforehand so like even though that like yes that makes sense and we wish it was that easy that's just simply not how it works under the hood and so we we can't consider it that way, yeah because one also one important fact to this as well is how the foliage Works in our game compared to how they work in a real engine because the foliage system that we have in satisfactory is isn't like is a custom solution and we've made for satisfactory because the thing you mentioned Jace where like when I click on this it it highlights all the bushes right because this is a big instance so when we render the foliage we don't render like one thing at a time we bulk them together and send like the data to the dpu we like render all this stuff which also means that each individual tree is not actually where it is no there's no object there like we can see this tree is at this location in the on the map but there is no game object of this plant that doesn't exist it's that's a hard thing to wrap your head around but that's how it works yeah for optimization reasons, and in our game you can walk up to this specific Bush and pick that specific instance up and we have had to make a system and I we've remade that system three times now, for various I've had to go of it you've had a go of it right yes, and and now in up to date there's going to be a new version of that folder system as well, where we sort of detect like which footage did you pick up and the reason why we've made it reworked it so many times is because of multiplayer because, we need to be able to tell from the server like which which Bush did you pick up the problem is that all these instances are not deterministic on client and host, they don't have like a like this specific Bush doesn't have the same ID on host and certain clients, so we have had made to make a system that kind of like figures out which bush is which Bush and then the added problem you mentioned where like you also need to be like when you're looking at the bush so we can highlight the bush that's another problem and not the entire instance of all the bushes exactly because in default in real engine if I want to highlight this particular Bush here it highlights the entire instant bulk that's why we used to have that issue way back when especially on multiplayer where people like, on client I can't pick up bushes and trees and I can understand from a player's perspective like this is like a basic thing why can't I just pick up this tree and it's like actually it's really not that basic it's like a complete pain in the ass it's like one of the most complex distance we have in the game yeah yeah it's like such a small part in the overall game really and the benefit of like dealing with this kind of stuff is that it's very performant but yeah after it because it makes all these assumptions to become more performant it also means that it's, harder to work with because it makes certain assumptions that things work a specific way when and then we go against that yeah because I think I wonder if I can do this, I want to Nuke the planet exactly I can't remember what the command is, whatever ignore that yeah so so, yeah the foolish system is is kind of custom made for our game, and, that's that's also one of the reasons why it's it's a bit tricky for us to just we can't replace it with nanite because it's our own folder system it doesn't go with the way epic has made it, cool there were 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