Thought I'd give a quick update on where things stand.

There's been a couple of updates:

First, I made some basic competitors, they'll only appear on the Release level where they'll all be in their cages, and when the game starts they all run for the exit. It's a bit silly now because it's all squirrels, but there will be more species added. They're also all generated and persistent on character creation.

Second, the Release level wolves have been updated so they actually run now. No more of them lurking in the cages and sauntering out. Now they pick a competitor or player and track them.

I've had a few bug reports on lag and speed issues, so I've taken the opportunity to start an optimisation pass. The most common issue seems to be crashes on dialog. I think this is a speed issue and more likely to happen on older machines. The  error logs I've seen are consistent with the GPU not being on a current driver. Because the game is running on a newer version of Unreal Engine, apparently if there's an older GPU driver, it can cause issues and crashes. No idea why it targets dialog processes though. To be honest, I'll probably be rebuilding dialog soon anyway.

As for the optimisation stuff, currently the game is completely fucked. Barely anything works. It turns out I learned how to build the game wrong.

Whenever you need something to speak to something else, for example an enemy punches the player, it needs to get data from the player. I thought the smartest way to do it would be for the enemy to Cast to the player at the start of a level so it knows where the player is and can connect and grab data as needed. It turns out what actually happens, is it stores the entire player in memory. Every single enemy in the game is running around with 800Mb of player data in memory. That's why things are slow...

So first, I removed the player characters. Previously there was a male and a female player blueprint. The main reason for no male players yet is that most functionality would be the same between the two, but updating every change is easy to miss something important. So the plan was to complete females, duplicate and make the male specific changes.

The easier way is to make a single generic Player blueprint with all those shared functions. Then for each player character, they have a child blueprint with their own unique functions but inheriting all the generic ones.

Then, once this was done, it lets me use other methods to transfer data, which is complex and I won't go into at the moment.

The result is that it works better, but every place in the game that casts to a player needs to be updated. At first count there were over 650 of them. I'm slowly rebuilding the functionality, but there's stuff that still doesn't work. It's a slow process, but moving along.