This past week has been quite the mixed bag, with some great progress at times, but also some setbacks due to corrupt project files. With only 4 weeks to go before our Format convention appearance, setbacks are definitely not welcome!
Continuing the push to get the NPC crew in an acceptable state, I wrote a new system for procedurally generating random hairstyles. As good as MetaHuman Creator is, each character you make is very static and weighs in at several GB due to the high-quality assets. That's just not practical with a crew of hundreds, so what I've done is started collecting all of the base assets to feed into my own procedural system. I've still got lots planned for it, but I'm quite pleased with how the hair system is turning out. I'm particularly fond of the random highlights;
But then things took a dramatic turn for the worse. When I went to package the game it crashed every single time, and while trying to backtrack on what I'd been working on I realised a number of key files were immediately crashing Unreal Engine simply by clicking on them. Even worse than that, all the automatic backups were corrupt too, because I'd had the engine open for a couple of days straight and it was continually saving the corruption to disk while the file remained intact in memory.
It took me a full day to figure it out, but it would appear you can't add LOD reduction to the hair-card meshes auto-generated by MetaHuman Creator. Any attempt to do so will corrupt the asset upon restarting the editor, and from that point it becomes unrecoverable. Thankfully, however, I was eventually able to recover the code I'd slaved over once the offending hair assets had been nuked from orbit.
With all the drama resolved, I was then able to draw a line under the NPC crew for now and begin focusing on the ship's electrical systems. I've been both excited and nervous about getting to this point because I'm embarking on what will be a tremendously complex set of interconnected systems. We're off to a good start though, and I've finished this week with a new WIP interface panel for the Fusion Reactor's Distribution Bus. You can connect and disconnect the various Bus connections, and it will automatically distribute the reactor's power over the active links. The next step now is to connect actual components to the power feed and calculate their live electrical draw. From this point things get crazy :P
