Deledrius wrote: dendwaler wrote:
The most difficult part is bringing the puzzles back in, with a different coding platform as using blueprints.
I think this would probably be the easiest part. Designing good puzzles is hard, and that's already been done. Making/converting the art assets is hard and takes a lot of work. Sure it'd take some doing (and there will probably be some frustrating edge-cases as usual), but implementing the existing puzzles for the most part should be far simpler than most aspects of porting.
Hmmm, yes and no.
When it comes to visuals, it's actually fairly simple to port. Materials can be recreated in Unreal easily with their excellent material editor (I don't think any other engine is as powerful on their material editor, actually).
Yes, meshes are time consuming because you need in Blender to do things like remove doubles vertices and find in each mesh the few triangles with messed up UVs - it's a strange behavior of PyPRP, and it's super-annoying to find which triangle has wrong UVs, so it takes some time.
As for placing lights once in Unreal, well, this isn't terribly hard and is quite fun. Also, since the lighting system is completely different you're not looking to reproduce 1:1 Uru's lighting, so you can get creative and have some fun with it.
So yeah, it's time consuming but it's also very simple, and you can do it in no-brain mode while listening to music or even a book (glorious modern era).
As for puzzles ? Well, in my opinion, these are the hardest. Reasons:
- Unreal's API is very close to how the engine itself works - meaning weird C++ naming conventions and tons and tons of functions with similar names (which make it hard to know which one you're looking for).
- Of all the programming languages available, Unreal picked... C++. While a reasonable choice for programming, it's the worse language for merely scripting behaviors. Oh, and obviously, you're stuck with using Visual Studio - forget about other compilers or other IDEs, Unreal will simply refuse to work with them. And Visual Studio is... Well, let's just say I'd prefer ANYTHING above VS.
- Fortunately, you can use the Blueprint system to visually script behaviors - which takes longer than coding but make it slightly easier to find the function you're looking for. It's still the same annoying C++ API behind it, though.
- Also, the mental effort required to convert a Python script using the Plasma API to a C++ script/blueprint using Unreal's API is much much higher than just removing doubles in every mesh of the scene.
- And obviously, you still have to link your script/blueprint to objects within the scene - animations, lights, detector regions, etc. Although not terribly bad, Unreal's interface is quite clunky compared to Unity.
Deledrius wrote: Yali wrote:
Apparently falling in VR is no fun. Goodbye Teledahn bridge puzzle.
My goodness, can you imagine the jump to the door in Gahreesen? Or the walk over the chasm to the door in Kadish Tolesa?
Depends how the VR controls are. Proper positional tracking and a "point to teleport" system instead of jumping helps you remain stable while enjoying the height. So does sitting on the floor while playing. By comparison, riding subworlds would be a LOT more uncomfortable.
But well, with standard "hold-key-to-run" movement, bad tracking and playing without being seated, that gets a lot more uncomfortable. The worse I've tried is running/falling in a direction while you're looking in the other
(and I'm positive Unreal has an issue with laptops having both Intel's integrated graphics and a GPU - which means I have to buy a new PC, even though my current one can handle most VR apps just fine. How delightful.)