GREETINGS. Thought I’d drop in and give you those tasty Minigolf deets.
Although we’ve technically had Minigolf running since April, @Foohy’s started to fine tune physics and whatnot. We’ll be laying down the gamemode base code in the next few weeks, as it’s the first game world we’re working on.
First off, we’ve finally established some form of workflow for creating the actual courses. Originally back in April we were planning on using tilesets to make courses, but it turns out that’d actually limit us in a variety of ways. So instead, we’re creating unified meshes in external modeling programs and then importing it in. That allows us to create extremely complex geometry without hassle.
I spent a day whipping up a bunch of prototype meshes just to see what could be done in UE4:
results went better than i expected.
Good news is courses are going to be sweet, but the bad news is I’ll have to redo the courses I made for the original island prototype.
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Additionally, if you’re keeping up to speed on our Trello, you’ve probably already saw that I’ve whipped up some new assets for minigolf.
So Matt, is the golf creation tool going to be like the Accelerate tool I saw in that one stream a while back? Where you have nodes to connect different pieces of the course?
It looks really smooth! But I have to guess that making the courses in an external modelling program will probably make the workflow slower? Or do you feel that modelling in an external program makes it even faster to build and test? Also, the flag and hole are looking really sexy.
Those minigolf physics look really good. But I have a concern.
At least in the first version of the alpha, I’ve noticed that the Ballrace physics seem to get a little dodgy when the framerate drops (i.e. the ball starts bouncing while riding a platform up when it was previously still). If this is a property of UE4’s physics, this brings up obvious reliability problems when it comes to such a physics-driven game as minigolf.
So the entirety of our golf courses are now made in external programs, like 3Ds Max and Maya. I may be doing this for source karts as well. The spline stuff I did on stream a while ago doesn’t work well for minigolf.
The course prototypes I made took less than an hour. Extremely primitive, fantastic results.
Now I’m wondering if my epic 1337 skills will be gone in this new, pimped-up Minigolf. But otherwise, damn, that’s some nice looking Minigolf! It will most likely be the first gameworld I’ll try out after I got TU in Early Access.
I’ve been using Max for about 14 months now, was a good decision coming from my BSP background. Too bad my highschool only taught Maya, I had to learn on my own.