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.