002: There Are Just So Many Tools
This week Epic has Motion Matching toys, Apple brings more games to its platforms and our Toolbox is full.
Welcome to back to the Outpost. Thank you so much to the 1000+ of you who have joined the team. We will be back every week with your dose of Unreal content.
As the summer kicks in the news stream slows down. However the summer also brings so many new pieces of artwork, tools and other great resources from indie creators. This week we have an eclectic mix to get you going on everything from RPG’s to multiplayer projects.
Next week we will be rolling out a new creator story feature with a closer look at the new technology going into Gears of War: E-Day, and what that means for Unreal Engine 5 development going forward. If you have a great story that you want to tell, reach out to Ollie here.
The Latest
Epic Releases Some Motion Matching Toys
One of the more impressive demos at Epic’s State of Unreal was its Motion Matching query based animation framework. Motion Matching was rolled out with 5.4. Alongside this release, as promised, Epic have released over 500 animation samples to get your characters moving. I’ve had a bit of a play around getting yourself up and running is very intuitive. If your animation system needs an overhaul this might be the project for you.
Apple Brings New Features To Game Porting Toolkit
Apple and Epic’s war wages on yet Apple’s Wine-based translation layer has grown some new features with WWDC this week. There have been the usual improvements and optimisations, but the big leap was the new inclusion of the AVX2 instruction set. This opens the door to some of Sony’s latest PC adventures as well as the latest Unreal Engine based Senna’s Saga: Hellblade II.
Game Porting Toolkit is worth a look if you are not fully invested in optimising your game for Apple platforms but would like to offer the option at low cost (it is just the PC game running after all).
Tackling Multiplayer in Unreal Engine
Sometimes the best things you discover aren't new. It's hard to find good guides for making the most of multiplayer with Unreal Engine. Mohammad Mossa shares his tips, tricks, and even mistakes to help you have a good experience. If you have an hour this weekend, this guide is worth reading.
Toolbox
The Outpost’s Toolbox is for new or updated tools to help make your Unreal Engine experience a little bit easier.
Steam Integration Toolkit
The team over at Betide Studio have put together a new Steam Integration plugin to handle all of your steam operations. If you are polishing up for playlists or thinking about a release on Steam this is worth a look, especially if you are having issues with some of the cross platform problems of the official plugin.
MounteaDialogueSystem
There seem to be an endless amount of pre-built dialogue systems for Unreal. Mountea Framework takes a different approach bundling in Interaction, Inventory and Game Manager modules. What caught my eye was how quick you could get up and running with Mountea, whether it be for a game jam or prototype having these tools out of the box (and open source) could get your next grand adventure moving.
Open Game Backend
Open Game Backend offers all the tools you would usually see from a major cloud provider but owned by you, and self hosted. If you are not afraid of sailing the self hosted seas then OGB should be on your star list for indie games through to small multiplayer experiments.
I managed to get up and running with the server in about thirty minutes with some basic integrations up and running. You will need a docker machine and a little bit of web know how, but the documentation is great with real world examples.
Quick Assistant
Erik Hasanof has been working on Quick Assistant for over five months. It’s a set of quality of life tools for Unreal that puts parts of the engine right where you want them when you need them.
Two particular highlights are the Bookmarks tab which organise your content and assets to your heart’s desire with tagging, groups and descriptive names so you don’t end up with four content browsers open. Secondly the Points of Interest Tab, which lets you break the ceiling of 9 viewpoints from your cameras and add a similar set of organisational tools to your camera work with descriptors to help you get things done more efficiently.
Pinboard
Check out the latest art we have been keeping a lookout for this week.
This week on the Pinboard we have lots of foliage with two very different takes. First up is S.A.P, by Angelo Dal Pra. a futuristic sci-fi scene leveraging Nanite, Lumen and HDR rendering. This is definitely one to fire up on an OLED monitor.
You can find out more about the project on Angelo’s Artstation.
Next up we have River Catacombs by Christian Grote, based on the concept art from Richard Norman, this beautiful scene is a beautiful exploration of an environment with great attention to lighting.
River Catacombs by Christian Grote
We’ll see you next weekend. If you are looking for your daily fix of Unreal news check out the shorts on our Youtube channel. Over and out from the Outpost.
Want to see your work featured in Unreal Outpost. Reach out to Ollie here.
