Hey everyone,

with this blog entry I will finish off my work for today. The entire day productivity was a bit weird, but I will go into more detail. First things first: Today I used my gaming windows PC to develop in UE4 and performance wise it was a good idea. Anyhow it wasn’t that easy to get everything up and running, since I had to install everything again UE4 and Visual Studio. This took quite a while. After that I also installed Blender to get working with some models and try importing etc.

 

The rough start with unreal

I won’t lie in the beginning and can tell you at this moment I am absolutely lost in UE4 and have no clue what I am actually do. I wanted to start with a simple Board game, so I tried around with building some landscape, getting models into the engine etc. All of this stuff is quite cool and the engine itself looks also very cool. But I haven’t yet written one line of code, which really bothers me as a developer. Everything is so visual and if you are not used to the whole editor it is just overwhelming. I often thought about: Do you really want to stick to UE4? My approach or better said working flow was so much different with libGDX. Most of the time I was writing code. Today, hm, what did I achieve? I watched a lot of tutorial videos, read through many documentations and tried different things to get different things done.

 

The things getting really fast unreal!

It is very surprising that you can just add a landscape give it a water material, some lights and you have some awesome looking water, but it somehow feels not right to me as a developer. Since I wanted to try out some models and lightmaps, I started with modeling in Blender and just created an easy hexagon for this purpose. Creating the uv for lightmap and exporting the model as fbx was quite simple. Also the import into UE4 works out of the box and there is nothing special to mention about. I was setting up some different cameras and testing around. Everything I actually do is more or less trial and error. Too many things are unclear to me right now and I always have the problem to not know where to solve a problem. For example you can create a whole landscape in UE4 with everything needed or you also can model the landscape in Blender and then import it to UE4. It is somehow confusing to me. Another thing is the blueprint scripting, actually you don’t have to write any line of code, you can just solve everything with the inbuild blueprint scripting.

 

Outlook

Of course I will stay focused on UE4 and learn a lot more. I hope, I will get more used to it the longer I try out different things or watch tutorials. For now I feel like an absolute newbie in game development, but I achieved an ingame scene today and want to share that one with you:

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