Bridge Over Troubled Water

This is probably going to be my last post. The project was nice, but competition on videogames market is totally insane, and I just got tired of developing something that would have been an inferior amateurish game. It was fun till it last, and I've learned a ton of things, but I think I'm just not interested anymore.

The first tests are positive, I managed to spawn hundreds of thousand of instanced meshes with almost no penalty in fps.
The only major problem I'm having with ue4 is that once you stop the simulation everything you spawned disappears. This is quite difference from before, and it changes my way of doing things completely. If I have to create a map and I have to test my tools I need my map to persist between changes of code. So right now to challenge is to find a plugin or other ways to make runtime objects to persist when the simulation stops. One thing that might be useful are blutilities.

So, the website has suffered a couple of catastrophic crashes, I simply hadn't the skills to recover it, I decided to shut it down completely. Maybe I'll use a managed server, which has much administrative burden.
Also I stopped working on the game since september, the reason being the terrible performance of an engine so old. So I started learning unreal blueprints, and I might be starting all over again. But of course now I'm much less motivated, basically I have 5-10 years of work ahead for no reason, as nobody would play such an amateurish looking game.
I think the mechanics were good by the way, and there were really innovative things.
This could be the last post of this blog, I need a complete refresh, and I don't feel it's of much use to update once in a year.

7 months without an update are too much even for me. I've rebuild the game from scratch, using mysql as a local db instance, instead of relying only on in-game arrays. Some operations are much more consistent now, and the game is more scalable.
I'm more or less at the same stage of 7 months ago, that means I'm building the scenario maker, while the map maker is complete.
The potential is good, I still haven't done a real map though, I want to concentrate on building things while I'll leave tweaks for later. Frame-rate is worrying me, my pc isn't exactly powerful but it's not even a disaster, I suspect that texturing the terrains is the real problem, so I might decide to only show textures at a certain distance, and replace them with solid colours when zooming out.
The website is under constant attack, I'm worried I'll have to reinstall everything very soon, or that I'll have to implement some ips, the spam also is crazy.
I might release another demo soon.

I've been working a lot on the gui lately, and also I remade the appearance of the terrains, mountains look much better now.
I now realize that the various terrain types have too different treatments, I must create one single way of treating terrains regardless of their type, so I think I'll remake this part.
Aside from this, not much else to say.

It's been a while since the last post.
I've had my headaches, had to study many boring things for my job and so on.
Also, I've suffered my usual inertia while going back to work on the game, it's really a slow moving engine for me.
By the way, the scenario maker is coming, it will let people decide possessions for each player, to place units in the map and set the scenario variables.
I'm stuck on a problem: should the units have a rigid footprint? or should I allow them to be stretched or bent? should they be composed of smaller subunits that the player can actually use? I haven't decided it yet, a voice tells me to keep it simple especially at this stage, I can always add more features later, but another voice tells me to put everything comes to my mind inside of the game.

My poor spot instance on aws has again been razed by a sudden spike in bid prices. I think this time the duration was 1 hour or so, and the price went 1 cent above my own.
I wanted anyway to remake the instance, so no big deal.
By the way the scenario maker has made a good progress, as I finalized the way land ownership is managed.
I'm now working on unit types, and their placement in the map. My ideas range from a basic implementation of units, to a more complex scheme of customization, in which the player can pick up various specialties (like alpine or paratrooper) and mix them, a bit like it happend in the original Alpha Centauri game.