Devlog/Tutorial 01 - Unreal Engine Grand Strategy, Blood and Iron

hi my name is Sam the developer of the annual engine Grand strategy project all blood 9 this is the first official devlog of significant length rather than just moving around a map it'll be a mixture of explaining various features in the game and hopefully serve as a helpful resource for those wanting to create something similar in Unreal Engine as well as provide those who interested with some information on how development is coming along if you have any questions or critiques feel free to write a comment which I'll try to answer there'll be time stamps for each part so if just want to know about the technical Game Dev stuff or the conceptual stuff feel free to skip to there one of the most difficult aspects of creating a strategy game is the map itself most well-known developers such as Paradox interactive have their own custom engines developed over Decades of KN how and research in all my efforts to make this project I found not a single game tutorial or anything of the sort with an alternative method often being suggested being to utilize thousands of meshes with each province being a different shaped mesh however this is slow both to create and render the method I decided on was one I can reasonably say has never been utilized in an unal engine game this is a province map if you've done a little research on moded Paradox games you'll find these large textures where each province has a unique color these are efficient but tedious to make so I created a province editor it allows me to create provinces with unique colors and Define their state and continent with provin is making up a state and States making upper continent this editor has allowed me to pretty rapidly create a large number of provinces by myself and Define other parameters such as position and unit location for fellow developers remember to use canvas render targets and then bake them to a texture due to their efficiency at scale as they only like to pixels you edit and are more optimized once the province ID map was created with an Associated a data table you can now start grabbing the color of a province via this handy function in C++ simple but epic recently changed how it works so a bunch of tutorials have broken so I hope this helps now we should have a simple interactable map but then comes the more mathematically complicated part in order to color in the map with data we utilize a 3D lookup table a 4096 by 496 canvas surrender Target acting as a 256x 256x 256 3D texture we then write to each pixel in the rbgb value it has on the province map this effectively got placed to the color of the province ID map with the desired color this may look inefficient as most spaces are empty however these are canvas render targets and are actually very optimal it also doesn't use a lot of GPU memory because it is an 8bit compression we also have heaps of GPU memory to play with due to the nature of map games now we got a working map but you're wondering how do we make it pretty well there's a variety of things we can do in terms of shading and stylizing that'll be unique to each project but one thing they should all share is smooth borders I use hqx which you can find many examples of in Shader toy to make these borders look smoother I also use nanite tessellation to create beautiful topography that actually is super efficient nanite for those that don't know allows for essentially infinitely scalable detail in this case I'm limited by the resolution of my height Maps but it looks super good still it'll look even better when I have the weather systems implemented now in terms of development so far with the game it's been going at a very good Pace here difficult features like the map and custom editors for both the map and history history being a province population editor have been finished in terms of actual gameplay Development I've implemented features like monthly and daily asynchronous ticks as well as implemented multiplayer subsystems and basic replication as well as an event and decision system which is highly optimized and allows for Extraordinary levels of customizability in a visual editor hopefully making it easier for potential moders I've currently almost finished the modifier system which allows for the cashing of variables which can be assigned at the nation Province or Pop level cascading down to their desired point this may seem simple but it must be optimized as this will be used for a variety of things such as Technologies and National Spirits after this I will probably start work on the economic system I plan to make it so each province can only produce one good at a time but this good can be changed to a different one if it is efficient enough with the efficiency of each good being determined by the the terrain climate vegetation as well as other factors such as more cult being produced in the S land further I'd like to implement more effectively than other games of this genre the struggle over Central Banking as well as the gold silver and B metal standards as well as F currency if you have any ideas feel free to suggest them thanks for watching this devlog hopefully these sorts of videos are better than just moving around a map especially when the development is now steering towards actual gameplay implementation please like And subscribe and comment if you want me to cover how I did something and especially if you have any suggestions for how I do the game or devlogs thanks for watching and have a great day

Channel: Stupid Ones Games

Views: 11,161

Keywords:

Id: yO2eoCSp-hY

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2024