I have some good news: I got hired for a full-time position as an AI developer at Uvalle Law Firm, PLLC! While I am not really at liberty to share job specifics, I will try to document what I learn there for future reference. It will be a particularly enlightening role as I have not had a chance to get very deep into AI/NLP yet, and it's definitely something I've been wanting to explore.
Anyway, as for my other updates with the game, I've been working relatively slowly on it considering my other responsibilities, but I managed to import the map into Unreal itself.
Above you'll see my rendering in Gaea. I usually develop on a Mac, so this is a Windows 11 VM. As I mentioned before, I had to pull the data from OpenTopography, and while 30m/px is fine as far as resolution goes, I decided to refine it some more via erosion techniques and exported it to a .raw file to import to Unreal.
And here's the terrain in Unreal. I've run into a dilemma where the scaling is kinda getting screwed up. I had to experiment with proportional scaling from Gaea, which didn't work, and then doing normalized scaling from Gaea and just manually adjusting the scale in Unreal, but that kinda ruins the realistic scaling that we want since we have to eyeball it.
There's also some issue where the player character cannot exist beyond a z value of 0, and the terrain is automatically low to compensate for sea level. As you can see in the screenshot, with the auto-material package that I bought from the community store, it's all snowy because that was the only way I could get the character to work.
Another issue is that you'll see the player character floating in midair. There is some weird issue with the collision + scaling here not interacting correctly that I will have to address.
Finally, I will be experimenting with nanite to see how it affects performance.
Overall, once these issues are ironed out we should hopefully be able to move on to adding other assets. As I said, it's a war sim so it will be nice to add some tanks or humvees or something. Stay tuned.
Update: Shortly after I posted this I continued to fiddle around with the settings and turns out I can make the kill Z value much lower than -1000, so I set it to -10000 and now the collision is working fine and the coloration of the terrain is fine. Guess that fixed like 3 problems in one, then. Will be trying nanite again; hoping it doesn't crash on me again (it started using >100 GB of VRAM).
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