Update #18 (Level 1 Procedural generation & UE5.3 Project update))

Hi everyone! It's the dev here (Sven). I wanted to give a more detailed and down-to-earth explanation of how things are progressing and how they will in the near future (especially considering this week has not lived up to the consistency we promised last week). Overall, the development and the progression of Subliminal has been going smoothly and I'm very proud of how much we've been able to get done just in the past week.

But, to be realistic, I'm still mainly the only Dev working, developing, and putting everything together for Subliminal, and that puts a cap on how fast we can progress. Timelines have historically been inaccurate for this reason, I would love to churn out patches and Alphas every 2 weeks, but with the current scale of the project and the scale of the development team (aka just me) it's proven to just not be realistic :/

I do sincerely apologize for every delay we've had, it has mainly been a fault of mine for setting much too optimistic releases and deadlines just to realize that it will take considerably longer after we're midway through the timeline :/ And while I'm proud of the development I've done and the 3D Modelling, Texturing, VFX Work, Audio Production, and Map Design that everyone working on Subliminal has done, having unreliable release dates is not something I want to continue. I would much rather have longer timelines and release estimates if it means we can keep them reliable for everyone here, and going forward, with the help of more of the team here, this is how I plan to set timelines. I hope everyone understands where I'm coming from with this and I want to personally thank everyone here for your support and love <3.
It's been an incredible journey so far and I can't wait to see where we end up! Additionally, we now have an Editor for posts here! Ref is now Patreon's official editor and will edit and manage updates and posts as well as help keep everything a lot more tidy.

Cheers Everyone! And let's get into this week's update!

Highlights:

⋅ Level 5 (The Hotel) Intro Puzzle Polish and Optimization

⋅ Level 18 Entity Work and Optimization

⋅ Level 2 (PipeDreams) procedural generation! (For more, check "The Details")

⋅ UE5.3 Project update! tons of exciting stuff to talk about here! Continued in "The Details" for you nerds out there.
And for anyone who isn't much of a nerd, we still have some exciting news!

Coming Soon:

⋅ THE OFFICIAL GAMEPLAY TRAILER RELEASE COMING VERY SOON! - The release date is expected to be August 31st @ Noon PST, 3 pm EST or 8 pm UTC.
(If your timezone is not displayed here, we'll be posting an announcement/event on Discord where it should use your local time!)

⋅ The Nostalgic Poll Submission showcase is still this Thursday

⋅ Unfortunately, the entity is getting more sporadic to take photos of, especially because it seems to thrive in its environment. After a difficult delay, we hope to get some photos by Saturday.

The Details (for nerds):

We've got some interesting stuff this week!

Starting with the project update to UE5.3! Coming from 5.1 there's a ton of stuff to unpack here that we'll be able to take advantage of. First on that list is a massive boost in Nanite foliage (which encompasses all of our foliage in Subliminal). Technically we're looking at around a 20% increase in render times which means massive jumps in fps for levels that include a lot of foliage, aka Level 309 (the fog and the path), Level 566 (the factory), Level 119 (The Waterpark) etc! In addition, we also have a big update in the hair category, which will allow for a much faster and more efficient rendering and more realistic simulation movement.

Last but not least, we have a ton of new procedural generation tools! Some of these have already been used in Level 1 (PipeDreams)! Things can get quite complicated here, so I'll try my best to keep it relatively simple. 🙂 The basic procedural gen structure of Level 1 can be thought of as basically a set of roads and intersections. When you enter the level, a base road variation (out of 4 possible base variations) is picked and placed beneath you. Then, the collision is checked, and a random amount of decoration items and changes (out of ~30 and 10) are added if they pass the collision. After that is finished, a connecting road piece is placed on either side of the main road, and the whole process is run again for each piece. This then runs 2 more times, with the second getting its lights turned off to hide the edge of the map. Now, condense that all into happening within a fraction of a second when you spawn and you have the Intro hall of level 1. But now what happens when the player decides to move? Here's where we get a bit more interesting...

In the original process we just completed filling in the first 7 road pieces, while it stops after the 3rd road out from the player, never actually stops running, it only gets blocked if it reaches a certain distance away from the player. This means that as soon as the player starts moving and crosses that threshold, a new road piece will be generated, but this time with a catch... The possibility of an intersection as well as a new, differently sized base road variation set. If out of the selection a normal road is picked, the same old process is used, but if an intersection is picked, a new part of our procedural Gen system will kick in and start looking for road ends in the horizontal plane as well. This process works at its core the same as our original road Gen process with all the same road variations and the possible spawning of a normal road, intersection, or alternate road.

Now once one of our systems happens on an alternate road, things get a little bit more complicated. Our system will check whether the road before it is a normal or alternate-sized road (intersection or not) and place one of 2 types of base roads: an alternate or a transition. Since we had a normal-sized network of roads up until now, our system will pick a transition (1 of 2 (in or out)) and place it down at the connection point. The next road in line after the transition of guaranteed to be alternate-sized, which has a decreasing chance down to 50% over the next 3 roads. After it eventually gets to an intersection or normal road, it will first place down a transition and in its place and then continue on with its normal process. In addition to the whole process, the roads approximately 4 segments down behind the player will disappear as the player moves along as the tailing edge(s) get reactivated to be possibly sensed and added onto by our system again in the future...