About those Exhumers skill books

This is going to be a quick post.

You may have noticed Exhumers skill books disappeared from NPC skillbook venders with the mining changes a while back. Since then a few players have been buying them all up and reposting for obscene prices.

CCP has been utterly silent on the matter. They won't say if it's intentional, a bug, or even if they'll be back on vendors eventually. Nothing but complete silence.

The thing is there's absolutely no reason to pay these crazy prices since you can still direct inject the skill from your skill sheet into your skill queue. Simply open your skill sheet, go to Spaceship Command, drag the Exhumers skill into your skill queue and this dialog pops up:

Click "Buy Skill" and it only costs you 39 million ISK instead of getting ripped off for over a billion on the market.

Return to Eve Online

I'm Back! After a 6 year hiatus from Eve Online I've started playing again (albeit far more casually).

A few months ago one of my Unreal Tournament friends was asking some questions about playing the market in Eve. That got me curious about my old accounts so I logged in to one of them to check it out. One thing led to another from there. Next thing I knew I was PLEXing all my accounts (with PLEX I already had from before) and restarting training queues.

One of the first things I noticed was that PLEX had changed. What used to be 1 single PLEX had been broken up into 500 smaller PLEX. I also noticed accounts now had Alpha and Omega states with severe limits on training and usable skills in Alpha state and requiring spending 500 PLEX a month for Omega state to lift the restrictions.

I posted a bunch of orders all over hisec / lowsec and even a few places in nullsec/deadspace/pochven to buy PLEX at around 2.2-2.3 million each. A lot of those orders got filled within days. If I'd realized at the time that PLEX was currently at the low end of the cycle I would have bought a whole lot more than the 60,000 or so I wound up with!

I also noticed broker fees and taxes had gone way up and there were player owned market hubs in many places with far lower fees and taxes than the old familiar NPC market hubs which I'd spent so much time and ISK on improving faction standings for to lower broker fees. Not being sure what to think of that or how it would affect my market strategy I decided to play it safe and not post many orders until I had a better idea of how the markets had changed.

I really didn't care for the player owned market hubs for multiple reasons which for the sake of brevity I won't get into here. However I was pretty much forced to use them in order to compete on buy orders.

About a month later, after a 2nd round of PLEXing accounts I started posting some more orders to test a few ideas and check out how the markets had changed. I bought a bunch of multiple training certificates to get 2 or 3 characters training new skills on most accounts too.

That was around the time I noticed the Margin Trading skill was gone, replaced by a new skill Advanced Broker Relations. That combined with the changes to broker fees and taxes made a big difference in how many orders I could post for how many items, at what prices and how often I could modify them. I didn't mind that at all it actually meant you had to have a strategy and post sell orders at sensible prices. Those who just mindlessly played the .01 ISK game with constant undercutting would very quickly be losing ISK.

Another month and another round of PLEXing accounts later I felt I had a pretty good handle on how things had changed and a strategy in mind for it. I spent an hour or two a day for a couple weeks posting lots of buy and sell orders and disrupting markets everywhere.

Then a few days ago (around the 26th or 27th of July) everything changed again... I was posting / modifying a few orders when I noticed the broker fee was well under 1%... Looking more closely I realized the order was on Jita 4-4 rather than Perimeter. At first I thought it must be a bug or glitch but I soon realized it was the same on all NPC hubs. If I had 0 standing with the station owning faction the broker fee was 1%, if I had positive standing (which most of my characters do) it was less than 1%. That's terrific, the best news I've had since coming back to Eve! Now when buy orders get filled I post replacement orders on the same old NPC hubs as in the past.

I've pretty much figured out my strategy for the future now. It'll involve getting out of some old markets and into some new ones. I'll probably get into skill point farming soon too, it seems like a very easy source of mostly passive income. All by itself it'd be more than enough to PLEX all of my accounts and add new ones every month.

One final note. One of my characters bought some PLEX on a player owned market hub in Pochven for something like 1.1 million each. The very next day I no longer had access to post on that player owned hub. That's no problem, Ichoriya suits me just fine and after the change to taxes and fees it's cheaper to post orders on Ichoriya anyhow.

Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Tournament 5

Unreal Engine 5 was made available for early access earlier today.

UE5 Early Access

The engine itself is a 12GB download without any projects. The only UE5 example project out so far is Valley of the Ancient and that's a 98.9GB download.

It probably won't be very long before a group (or several different groups) of Unreal Tournament fans announce they've started working on yet another new fan made Unreal Tournament remake. Like the others before it'll probably never get anywhere near a finished playable game.

But we can always dream. UT5, Open Tournament 5 or whatever. Personally I think Tournament Royale (featuring a battle royale gamemode of course) has a nice ring to it.

DM-HeatRay remake

 Remake of DM-HeatRay from UT3 for UT4 Pre Alpha.

HeatRay was one of the maps included with the UT3 Demo and a very popular map in UT3. Though I never played UT3, this was one map I kept hearing players wanted in UT4 so I decided to try my hand at converting it.

It turned out pretty good. I'm very happy with the results and really starting to like playing the map myself now.

I mostly used the original meshes and textures though I did change meshes and materials for several decorative props like barrels, trash, trees, grass, ivy vines and ferns. Lighting is very similar to the original too. Layout is identical but scaled up to suit UT4 character scale and movement.

The DarkWalker is decorative only, it is not a vehicle like it was in the UT3 map. I did make a few item pickup changes, placing a redeemer underneath the Darkwalker, replacing Invisibility with Damage Amplifier and replacing 25 armor with 50 armor.

Download here: https://utcc.unrealpugs.com/map/1491-DM-HeatRay

P.S Thanks to Barsam for running the UT3 map through UT4XConverter to extract the original assets for me.

FIXED!!!

 After years of struggling with severe stuttering, hitching, freezes, etc., etc., and feeling like I'm playing with super high ping most of the time in UT4 I think I've finally found a fix for it.

I've tried multiple hardware upgrades, multiple fresh OS installs and countless tweaks over the years. Many things helped a bit but nothing ever got rid of it entirely. Then last night while researching the issue on Google I ran across a newer ini tweak I'd never heard of before that many players in multiple different UE4 games attribute to fixing similar issues for them.

And it worked for me in UT4 too.

To try the tweak yourself just open your Engine.ini file (found in Documents\UnrealTournament\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor) and add the following to it:

[/script/engine.audiosettings]

bDisableMasterEQ=True

Enjoy!

DM-Laputa Rework

 The last few weeks I've been doing a major rework of my original map DM-Laputa.

No that's not Spanish. The name was inspired by the anime movie  "Laputa: Castle in the Sky". 

Just about everything has been reworked from layout, item selection / placement and spawns to meshes, materials, textures and emitters. The old version was far too open with great sightlines everywhere so I added a lot of sight blockers (rocks, walls, towers, trees, etc.) to fix that. There's quite a bit more vertical variation too, lots of level changes to make the gameplay more interesting and fun.

There are climbable (walkable actually) ladders in a few places and don't forget to try some barrel racing.

I'm waiting on feedback from a few testers before releasing a new version to the public but hope to release one before Christmas. Anyhow, way too much changed to easily list most of it here, so here are a bunch of screenshots.

September free for the month

 September has been a good a month for free UE4 marketplace asset packages. Besides the two mentioned in my previous post, the September "free for the month" packages were released a little later. I plan to use two of them.

First there's Bunker, a nice, very modular set of meshes for making underground bunkers.

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/bunker

It can be installed on Unreal Engine 4.16 or higher and uses very simple materials so it's quite easy to down port to a lower engine version like 4.15.0 for Unreal Tournament 4.

Packing the demo map in UT4 filesize comes in at over 1.1GB but that's with a lot of 4k and 2k textures. By simply LoD biasing to reduce texture sizes to 2k/1k I got it down to a little over 120MB with not much loss of visual quality. Packing the metallic, roughness and ao textures into MRA maps would reduce it even further.

The other new package is Starsphere. Something that is very lacking in UT4. Similar to the skysphere blueprint only for space skies and more versatile. 

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/starsphere

This is a very small but quite good package available for UE4 4.12+ (I wish I'd noticed that before porting it by hand from 4.25 to 4.15). Besides the many adjustable parameters for stars, it has parameters for things like space dust, blackholes, novas, Saturn and the Sun. There is also a planet blueprint with panning textures that make the planets look like they're rotating with different speeds for surface and clouds, have atmospheres and includes textures for Venus, Earth and Mars.

Factory Environment

I just found this new permanently free package on the UE4 Marketplace. Downloading it now but it looks like an amazing pack for industrial / factory interior maps.

Factory Environment Collection

854 unique meshes!

There's another new permanently free pack up too.

 African Animals Pack

I might have to use that croc somewhere.

DM Titan Fortress

 I've been working for a while on a large new deathmatch map, tentatively named Titan Fortress.

To keep the filesize down I decided to mostly use assets from CTF-TitanPass. I started with 2 meshes (mirrors of each other) that make up the ground in TitanPass mid and added castle wall / tower assets from the UE4 Vehicle Game demo.

After trying a bunch of different things and finding the filesize kept getting too big very quickly I eventually decided to use several more ground meshes as well as the "skybox" / background setup from TitanPass too. That reduced the filesize significantly but makes the map more similar to TitanPass than I wanted, hence the name. If you're very familiar with TitanPass you'll definitely get deja-vu on this map.

Then I made a landscape material and a few custom ground meshes. I also added some odds and ends from other sources. Barrels, gargoyles, banners, metal spikes/spires and so on.

Here are some screenshots showing progress made so far.

The lower middle parts of the map probably won't change too much from what's in the screenies above but I'm still working on blocking out the layout and meshing behind the highest walls on both sides of the map.

Let me know what you think!

Stupid Crow

I spent hours last night troubleshooting a very simple blueprint.

That's it, only 4 nodes, nothing at all complicated. But I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't play the sound when I shot it (Event PointDamage) yet worked fine when I bumped into it (OnComponentHit). It made no sense at all.

Then around 4:30 A.M. I finally fixed it...

It turns out the sound was playing the whole time after all. The problem was the sound of the gun I shot it with drowned out the crow caw sound. All I had to do to make it work as intended was add a short .3 second delay between receiving the hit event and playing the sound.

I'd better wait until tomorrow before trying to add a trigger event to make the crow caw whenever a player comes within a certain (configurable) distance of it.

freepbr.com

Another useful site to get free PBR textures from is freepbr.com with texture maps for 150+ materials.

The best thing about this site is all of the textures are completely free with no watermarks, resolution limits, daily download limits or any other limitations. You can download textures freely as individual zips, with all the textures for a single material in a zip, or you can pay $5.00 for access to 6 large zips (roughly 500-800MB each) containing all the textures for all the materials.

Most texture resolutions are 2048x2048 and/or 4096x4096 but some are odd sizes (2685x2685 for example) that are not powers of 2 and thus can't have mip maps.

Quality is very much a mixed bag, some are pretty good, others really aren't very good at all. Hand adjustment through liberal use of lerp, power and multiply nodes in your materials can make many of the not so good ones look ok too.

textures.com

Just a quick FYI for UE4/UT4 mappers... textures.com has some good quality textures in the PBR section. All materials are in the metallic/roughness format and in general look pretty good in UT4/UE4 without any tweaking through materials nodes. You can download up to 15 1024x1024 textures per day for free and there are no watermarks on the free versions either!

Higher resolution versions of the textures are only available with paid credits. I'd probably buy higher res versions of several textures if the payment scale wasn't so heavily weighted against small purchases. It costs a lot more per texture to purchase a small number of credits for immediate use than a larger pack and even less for monthly credits (credits are monthly, payment for them is all up front).

https://www.textures.com/browse/pbr-materials/114558

Many of the textures in their extensive collection of non PBR diffuse textures work quite well too after using a tool like ShaderMap4 or Materialize to generate proper PBR texture maps from them.

Shroud comments on UT4

Shroud, a well known streamer with thousands of followers, comments on UT4.

I'd never heard of him before, until the other day when he decided to stream UT4 from my Unreal Carnage Chicago hub. Within minutes there were 6 instances (in spite of my having set maxinstances=4) and about 50 players. The load crashed my poor little 3 core hub.

Anyhow here's a clip of what he had to say about UT4.

https://clips.twitch.tv/FragileSillyUdonFreakinStinkin

Flak and RZE of the UT Team noticed. Right after that they were more active, Flak playing the game and RZE talking about possible mods in Discord, than anyone from Epic has been in over a year.

And another Shroud clip

https://clips.twitch.tv/AmazingHumbleFennelMrDestructoid

In case anyone from Epic reads this, if you ever come back to working on UT4, please fix it so maxinstances=# actually works!

Permission Granted

I finally managed to contact Eric "ebolt" Boltjes and get permission to remake his original UT99 maps DM-Nitro and DM-Bishop for UT4.

I'd already been working on both maps for some time but was unable to find contact info for him until recently.

Thanks again Eric!

DM-Nitro

http://ut4.unrealcarnage.com/ut4redirect/DM-Nitro-WindowsNoEditor.pak

I've kept the meshes and materials light on Nitro for performance reasons (I want it to be played competitively). It's a fairly large map, large enough to play well in 8 man FFA DM and 4v4 TDM, yet small enough to work well for Duel too.

I made a number of item placement changes to better balance playing the entire map, making the strong high side less overpowering for control, the weak side stronger and to encourage running the whole map rather than just controlling a small area around the sniper rifle and shield belt / 50 armor.

It mostly uses stock assets with a few custom materials and meshes.

DM-Bishop

http://ut4.unrealcarnage.com/ut4redirect/DM-Bishop-WindowsNoEditor.pak

Bishop is a larger map that plays well in FFA DM and should be ok for TDM but is too large for Duel.

I've moved the 100 armor to the other side of the map and put a 50 armor where the 100 used to be. That should make it play better in TDM though it could use more testing and feedback in TDM.

I've gone for more of an atmospheric, moody and colorful look in Bishop but it still performs very well too. It uses a number of custom assets from several different UE4 demos and asset packages as well as a few assets I made myself.

Notes

Both maps have three UTGenericObjectivePoints which get used in gamemodes like Showdown, Domination and ShockDom.

PSK to OBJ Conversion Script

Just a quick post to share a little psk_to_obj python script Scoob (the author of Elimination) whipped up for me that makes porting meshes from older UT games with XTXP's UT4 Converter much easier.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0TfHeypIQIaY0JXMUZTaXB1Ync

I've tested it fairly extensively on UT 2k4 meshes under Win 10 and it's worked perfectly for me in all of my tests.

Usage:

You need to have python installed.

• Run the Converter program as usual.
• Import all the textures and "Make Materials" for them. This must be done first or the materials won't be automatically applied when you import the meshes.
• Once Converter is done drop a copy of the psk_to_obj python script into the folder where Converter put the *.psk meshes.
• Double click on the psk_to_obj script.
• Wait a few seconds for the script to finish.
• Open the UT4 editor, go into the content browser and "Import" all the *.obj files.

You'll now have all the meshes in UT4 ready to use. You may wind up with some missing materials (the ones that weren't just simple textures in the old engine) but for the majority of maps and meshes most of the materials will be there and automatically applied to the meshes.

A big thumbs up and a thank you to @Scoob for writing this script!

Maps repacked and moved to a new location

Since the Play Unreal redirect went down I've moved the Unreal Tournament 4 maps I'm working on back to MPF.

Multi Player Forums Redirect

Unfortunately while the MPF redirect is working for uploading and downloading with a web browser it is NOT WORKING as a redirect.

Most of my maps are back on the MPF redirect depository and in-game redirects are working again now.

DM-Landscape has not been uploaded because Epic broke something in the most recent build(?s) preventing the trees from displaying at longer distances. It almost seems like they hard coded foliage cull distance, changing it to 0.0 (used to disable distance culling) or 500,000.500,000 (very large values) in editor makes no difference.

The problem is long range sniping is what the gameplay on Landscape is mostly about. The trees have collision and function as cover... If you can't see the trees your shots get blocked by invisible collision. If you zoom, the trees do fade back in, but still, it's a problem.

If you're looking to chat with me about any of my maps (feedback, suggestions or w/e) I can be found on Discord.

UC Discord
Epic Discord

UT4 Maps Repacked

Another new build with a game engine bump means all custom maps need to be repacked again. All 16 of mine have been repacked and can be found here:

https://redirect.playunreal.com/ut4/users/MoxNixddcd/

DM-Antalus-A3-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Bishop-A10-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Codex-A13-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Conveyor-A3-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Eliminator-V26-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Gothic-A8-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Grinder-A3-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Landscape-07-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Malevolence-V18-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Mojo-A9-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Nitro-V17-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Phobos-A6-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Pressure-A4-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Tempest-A4-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Turbine-A09-WindowsNoEditor.pak
DM-Zeto-V12-WindowsNoEditor.pak

And some screenshots:

DM-Nitro

DM-Eliminator

DM-Tempest

DM-Codex

DM-Antalus

DM-Bishop

DM-Codex Progress Report

My DM-Codex remake was getting a little too big (filesize) and I wanted to scale the whole map up a bit since it was starting to play a bit too tight after multiple in game changes to movement and player scale over several months.

I decided to redo the whole map from scratch, significantly reduced the filesize in the process and released that. Now I'm polishing it up and adding details. It's getting bigger again, but not as big as before, plus it's more detailed and looks better too.

Here are a few quick screenshots taken in the editor.

Note: There is something wrong with lighting builds in the current version of the editor. It seems like bounced lighting isn't being applied correctly and messing up the shadows. It'll look better once that's fixed (hopefully in the next version of the editor which rumour says is coming soon).

UT4 Editor - Using Blueprint Skewmesh

Among the more useful new features in the UT4 Editor are skewmesh blueprints. There are 3 types of skewmesh blueprints, BP_SkewMeshX, BP_SkewMeshY and BP_SkewMeshZ.

What these blueprints do is take a mesh and allow you to move one end of it in any direction (up or down and to either side) around one of the 3 axis (X, Y or Z). Skews are extremely handy for aligning trim, wall meshes and other modular meshes along angles they weren't designed to fit. They don't solve every mesh alignment problem but they do help a lot.

Anyhow like they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here are several thousand words worth.

This first is a BP_SkewMeshY with the default mesh (a Liandri assets pillar/column) assigned to it.

You can change the mesh your skewmesh is operating on in the details panel. Here I changed it to use one of the Liandri assets floor trim meshes.

And here's another an example of that mesh zoomed in close so you can see the seam where the beveled edges of two meshes (one skewed,  one not) meet. The top part looks a little funny but that's a problem with material alignment on that particular mesh, not with mesh alignments which are perfectly lined up with each other.

Here are two instances of a floor panel mesh. The one on the left is by itself (not skewed). The one on the right is another instance of the same mesh inside a BP_SkewMeshY. Notice the transform handle named "End" to the right of the skewmesh. That's the transform gidget we use to move that end of the mesh around. This is quite similar to selecting and moving surfaces with the BSP editing tools.

Next, I've pulled the mesh upwards to make a ramp and added another instance of the mesh to the right. Notice how the edges of the skewed mesh align perfectly with the other meshes... Unlike when trying to get the same look by rotating and/or scaling the same mesh. They also light better and have fewer problems with z-fighting too.

Finally, here's the same skewmesh skewed to 45 degrees to one side rather than up. If I'd wanted an angled ramp, I could have skewed it both up and to the side at the same time.

There are some problems with various materials on skew meshes (they look fine in editor but show the default checkerboard grid material in game) but you can work around that by merging meshes. You can merge just a single skewed mesh or multiple meshes (both skewed and not skewed). Merging probably helps with performance too.

In case anyone wants to take a closer look at similar mesh alignment seams in-game, the map in the screenshots is DM-Nitro.