Welcome to the fifth weekly devlog update of Mythforge

Stuff I've worked on in the past week:

• Changed the lighting setup of Lordenfel
• Worked on interactable foliage
• Update the projects engine version from 4.24 to 4.25
• Added new enemy models
• Worked on character armor model
• Minor bug fixes

New Lighting Method

Previously, Lordenfel map was using the static lighting method where I had to render the whole map everytime I moved a mesh or changed a light settings. Each render was taking like 30-60 minutes, so it wasn't practical. I've changed this method to Distance Field method and now everything is dynamic and I don't have to render the map.  This helps tremendously because I can play around with the assets and see the result instantly, hence I can spend more time creating instead of waiting. 

As far as I know, there is also the benefit of everything being dynamic, so I can move lights and meshes during playtime to create more interesting puzzles and visuals. But I might not be 100% correct on this one so we will see.

However, I had to setup some settings for each mesh individually so they didn't look bad with this method. 

Here is a gif, showing the difference (again, the purpose of this change wasn't for quality but for practicality):

Just to be clear, the scenes lighting will change in the future. I just changed the method of lighting at the moment and played around with the lights just a little to try to match it to the previous version.

Interactable Foliage

I tinkered with the materials of the existing foliage assets a bit and used the distance field system to make vegetation move when our character walked in it. But I realized a big problem with this system: I can't (as far as I know) use this method because vegetation is reacting to any collidable object. This means walls, pillars and also ground.

So I disabled this for the moment but if I find a way to use this without making grass fly I can easily enable it in the future.

Here is how it was looking like:

Engine Version Update

I updated the engine to 4.25 which is nice just because it's a newer version but the main reason behind this was to be able to use the new enemy models. The creator I bought the models from wasn't providing a version for 4.24 and I couldn't add them to a 4.25 project and copy paste it to my project which was in version 4.24.

New Enemy Models

I've bought a nice skeleton pack as a placeholder to speed up the project and not waste time on modeling minion models when the project doesn't even have funding. Like I talked about in the earlier devlogs, my priority is to create a polished demo level right now.

The pack had skeletons and two kinds of armor, plate and cloth. I used the plate for a melee minion and cloth for a magician minion.

Here is the knight enemy:

And here is the mage (I'm getting my butt kicked :D )

I'm also aware of the weird flickering issue in the puddles. Trying to fix it.

Character Armor Models

I've started working on a character armor set with a reference I liked. It's really rough at the moment  and it will probably take weeks to finish it given the lack of hard surface sculpting skills of mine. I will try to make it myself but if it isn't working out I might think of something else later.

Here is a screenshot:

And here is the reference I was talking about:

That's all for this week and see you next week!