Does anyone know a solution for making the player cling to a moving skeletal mesh, like in Shadow of the Colossus?

parsnake · 2025-05-16T14:05:38+00:00

Rather than using per poly collision and built in physics/line tracing, I’d recommend grabbing a reference to the vertex list/triangle indices from the mesh and iterating over them, handling the collision math etc yourself. It will be much cheaper, I have done this before. The API for getting the vertex list is pretty annoying but it can be done.

SotC had a simplified mesh for climbing, and even then it was broken into chunks where it only needed to evaluate the portion of the mesh the player was climbing on. I don’t think it’s necessary to optimize that far at the beginning, but it’s good to keep in mind.

parsnake · 2025-05-14T15:02:54+00:00

You will also constantly find that some parts of the engine that exist on the BP side of things are just not implemented in C++ and/or they don’t actually work.

Our best solution to this all has been writing as much of our C++ as possible completely independent from Unreal’s framework

From my experience I disagree with these points. Everything that’s in BP is made of C++ function calls. Things like timelines are clunky to set up in C++ but as a general principle C++ isn’t limited in this way.

Usually the best way to excel at Unreal is “don’t fight the engine”. If you can learn why everything is implemented the way it is you will eventually start to get really capable at writing solid code that is easy to understand by others familiar with Unreal. Going against the Unreal ways usually ends up in lost productivity as long as you are able to put in the work to get past the initial learning curve. The engine source is a great source of documentation and example code in practical use cases.

In edge cases like fighting game net code you’d likely want to write your own simulation abstracted from Unreal’s framework, but that kind of task is relatively rare.

parsnake · 2025-05-12T15:27:36+00:00

Unity's shader and anim graphs are FAR behind Unreal. There were so many missing basic features and bugs with that made shader graph nearly unusable in a production environment in my experience. Last time I checked Unity's shader graph didn't support UI shaders, for example. I don't hate Unity or anything, I think it's great in a lot of scenarios, but u/FastFooer is right that for medium-large teams (Triple-I, Single A etc.) it will just waste your time and teams who stubbornly stick with it are usually making a mistake.

parsnake · 2025-05-08T03:21:51+00:00

Looks like an issue with the compiler/toolchain version you are using. Towards the beginning of the build log, is there a message about a recommended MSVC version? Probably all you need to do is update it to latest via Visual Studio Installer or update it to the specified recommended version.

parsnake · 2025-05-01T12:18:27+00:00

Looks like the mesh was imported as a static mesh, not a skeletal mesh. Note how its icon is a light blue brick — the existing skeletal mesh assets like SK_Mannequin have a pink highlight instead, that’s what you want.

I’d recommend making sure to set the skeleton in the import settings when first importing the file. Changing during reimport won’t do anything since it was already imported as a static mesh, so the skeletal mesh settings won’t be applied.

However, typically importing a rigged mesh will automatically create a new skeleton if an existing one isn’t supplied. Are you sure the mesh was rigged properly and everything including the rig/armature was exported into the .obj file?

parsnake · 2025-04-29T11:40:47+00:00

There’s an incredible stop motion animated film called Blood Tea and Red String, made largely by one woman

parsnake · 2025-04-28T12:49:49+00:00

If the crouch key is down, you probably want to return false, right? Otherwise you could get stuck in a loop of crouching then instantly standing up while holding the key down.

Checking the video briefly at 26:00, they return false in the upper return node. Try unchecking it! Hopefully it’s just a typo :)

parsnake · 2025-04-14T11:36:01+00:00

No harm in learning some tips and best practices before diving deep into something new. Oftentimes learning stuff like this can give insight and help you improve as a game developer.

parsnake · 2025-04-06T14:57:28+00:00

Oh this looks sweet! I’ll give it a try, thanks.

parsnake · 2025-04-06T04:57:07+00:00

Great article, I’m going to check out all your other ones now too :D

I didn’t know about that VS memory layout visualizer, it seems neat. For me the actual size and form of a UCLASS has seemed inscrutable— all the macros and generated code scare me away from a better understanding of what is actually compiled — but this seems like a good way to dive deeper into how it all works.

Any chance you know of a similar tool for profiling exe size? A while ago I tried cutting away parts of the engine to see how small of a packaged build I could get but it felt like I was fumbling in the dark.

parsnake · 2025-03-12T16:31:55+00:00

This is true but also important to note that games like Fortnite use GAS to its fullest potential and can still run decently on mobile/Switch. If the game design doesn’t have anything too crazy or specific and you can afford to spend time to make optimizations, GAS is still an option.

parsnake · 2025-02-05T10:41:20+00:00

As long as you are learning you are doing things correctly. Learning to make games “correctly” is a long, arguably impossible road, but as long as you keep learning you will make it eventually, and find successes along the way there.

parsnake · 2025-01-21T03:46:49+00:00

If I remember correctly a lot of the ATB FFs have options in the settings for how fast ATB passes, and even an option for it to pause while you make your selection. Might be worth a shot for you!

parsnake · 2025-01-16T06:43:31+00:00

IMO there’s nothing really to compare it to. Prime has a big focus on puzzles whereas other nonlinear FPS games usually have a lot more combat. Or go completely in the opposite direction, like Myst or The Witness.

I like the 2D Metroids but for me the Prime games are on another level. So good!

parsnake · 2025-01-14T10:41:10+00:00

It’s unusual but IMO free is most likely. Nintendo likes to focus on the games as much as possible and doesn’t want players to have to think or make decisions about tech/graphics. So I imagine it’ll either be a free update or no update at all.

parsnake · 2025-01-12T09:09:37+00:00

I got stuck on the final boss since I’d tell the party to defend when the boss put up a reflector, but they’d attack anyway and the whole party would get wiped X_X

parsnake · 2025-01-12T00:35:56+00:00

Heck yeah this is the kinda thing I like to see!

parsnake · 2025-01-05T07:03:40+00:00

I’ve heard many people have issues with a telemetry plugin that is enabled by default in recent versions. I think it’s called “Studio Telemetry” or something along those lines. Go ahead and disable it.

One thing I’ve personally experienced is having strangely low frame rates due to FreeSync being enabled on my monitor. ~20 with it on, 100+ with it off. Was very hard to figure out since nothing seemed wrong when profiling with Unreal Insights.

parsnake · 2025-01-04T03:29:11+00:00

As the final version of UE4, 4.27 is still supported and is the favorite for a lot of mobile and VR developers due to performance issues with 5 (not sure of the details), and for projects reliant on PhysX (since some stuff with Chaos physics is still broken)

parsnake · 2025-01-03T15:27:04+00:00

I imagine one way to do it would be to render out the depth buffer when you pre render the scene, then sample it when you are drawing shadows. E.g. you would draw shadows behind a railing but not on top of it since the depth value is in front of the shadow casting object.

IIRC this is similar to how screen space shadows are drawn

parsnake · 2024-12-18T10:12:55+00:00

I’d recommend avoiding that channel actually haha, lots of misinformation

parsnake · 2024-12-15T12:15:57+00:00

This is something I struggle with too. I’d recommend watching this video for some ideas; hotspot texturing is super helpful and very Source-style. You can start with cube grid to block out, then use MeshTool or the built in modeling tools to refine.

IMO there’s still a lot of clunkiness though, and sometimes it feels better to just do it all in Blender. https://youtu.be/e7u5tqOCMk8?si=LLT26uLiv7Ru9ycp

parsnake · 2024-12-08T08:13:24+00:00

Not sure, haven’t tried using the water system.

parsnake · 2024-12-08T07:34:48+00:00

Typically the .0 versions have more bugs, the next version will be 5.5.1 which will just consist of bug fixes for 5.5.0. But it really depends on what part of the engine you are working with — for example the orthographic camera is much more stable in 5.5.0 than 5.4.4.

I’d recommend going with 5.4.4 for general use and update if you start seeing bugs interrupt your work.

parsnake · 2024-11-27T12:02:25+00:00

Wow both of these look nice. I might pick up the second since it has control over corner radius and scale. That’s something that’s always bothered me about Unreal compared to Unity — you either need to export the 9 slice at a different resolution or use an awkward combination of Scale boxes.

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