This is my study project on Unreal Engine 5. The primary purpose is to study UE5 and how to make any 3D first/third person game with it. Most of the work here is first focused on studying how to make the basic mechanisms common to most exploration/survival/builder games around like terrain, player movement and interaction with environment, multiplayer techniques etc. The plan contains more exhaustive list and possible directions of actual gameplay that may come later.
Recent state of the game has the following main features implemented at least at basic or rudimentary level:
- procedurally generated and editable voxel based world terrain mixed with non-voxel assets like trees and rocks
- harvestable trees and rocks
- some foliage
- the world has varying temperature and moisture levels contributing to local terrain features and flora
- swimmable water at sea level
- first and third person cameras with zoom in/out
- day-night cycle
- player inventory
- containers like boxes where player can store items
- crafting by player at hand and at a crafting bench
- constructing buildings
- map view (rudimentary, now mostly meant for visually checking the generated terrain)
- sounds from some player actions
- fire place with fire casting lighting effects
- rudimentary world map view
- animals that migrate and can detect and attack player
Some pictures of the scenery and UI
Almost all features are written in C++ with some blueprint support here and there.
The voxel terrain uses the free version of Unreal Engine Voxel Plugin 1.2.
Foliage and havestable trees and rocks are implemented using instanced static mesh foliages for performance. The world can already now easily have hundreds of thousands of trees, rocks etc.
Water is simply a large water body at sea level as the Voxel Plugin does not support water voxels.
To non-Unreal Engine programmers, certain C++ coding practices may seem odd due Unreal Engine's way of dealing with C++ mostly due its need to automagically integrate C++ and its visual scripting tools aka blueprints.
For example:
- memory management has to rely mostly on Unreal Engine's built-in garbage collector making raw-looking pointers seem unsafe at first glance, but UE inserts GC code using the macros and code generation (e.g. to all
UPROPERTY(...)lines) - actual written code is not directly compiled, but UE build system generates the actual compiled code including the Visual Studio project files resulting into e.g. special includes and project structures in the source code
- all class, structure and interface definitions are very macro heavy (
UCLASS(...),USTRUCT(...),UPROPERTY(...),UFUNCTION(...),GENERATED_BODY...) - multiple inheritance of implementation cannot really be used and interfaces also have UE specific patterns
- standard C++ STL library is rarely used due UE having only support for its own containers, iterators, shared pointers and such
- standard C++ exceptions cannot be used
I have excluded some asset packs to save space (over 10+GB), so you need to add these before building from scratch:
- European Hornbeam
- Procedural Nature Pack
- Animation Starter Pack
- Low Poly Viking World
- Infinity Blade: Effects