Bugfix Version 3.2.1

So that didn't go well.

There's a bit of a story here, but before I go into it I'll say the bugfixes:

Male Player Character not spawning right

This one was bad, and not sure how I missed it. Basically, after going through so many files trying to work out why it did it, I discovered that the Male Maned Wolf blueprint had been reset so the character model was the female squirrel and the actual model was rotated by -90. This has been fixed and should all be good now.

Photomode couldn't take photos

This one I actually know what happened. This is due to an Unreal Engine version change. The blueprints needed updated to work in the new version. I'll explain the engine change further down the page.

Enemy skins were broken

This was seen in the last release. The problem was that the models had LODs added. These are Levels of Detail, so depending on how much screen the character takes up, it'll change LOD to match. so LOD0 is full resolution, LOD1 might have half the triangles in its mesh, so each level gets simpler and simpler. This is meant to make it so a character in the distance uses less resources on its mesh because you can't see the details at that range. The problem with the texture is that the skin is built to work with LOD0 and moves around as you reduce LOD. Every time the skin changed, it was switching LOD level.

It has been fixed by removing LODs. Unreal Engine 5 uses Nanite which dynamically simplifies meshes similar to LOD, and adjusts the textures at the same time. We weren't using it on characters as they are Skeletal Meshes and until UE5.5 were not supported by Nanite. We are now on 5.5 so they can be Nanited, solving the issues.

M/F Capture Animation stalled

This is another mystery one. A single connection was broken in the animation chain. We've done no work on this blueprint for a few releases, so who the fuck knows why it was split like that.

So, why the fuck did these happen?

Basically, they all stem from changing our version of UE from 5.2 to 5.5. Maybe not the first bug, still not sure what happened there, but the other two are engine version issues.

A month or so back, my C: drive broke and I had to rebuild my system, and lost a lot of software and setups. I had to reinstall both UE and VSCode, which UE uses as a compiler. The problem really starts when you discover you can only get the most recent versions of VSCode without a MS subscription, and that UE versions have a minimum required VSCode version to compile. I had no way to get a version of VSCode that would compile UE5.2 so had to move up to the latest version. It seems there's been a lot of changes though and it took most of a day to update our game systems where it didn't play properly anymore. 

So it broke the photomode, though that was just a case of updating the plugin. Conversely it fixed the LOD issues. I was ignoring that problem as the enemies are changing to new models soon anyway, and it felt like wasted effort to spend hours fixing that when those models would be going anyway.

Regardless, the new version with the bugfixes should now be live.