Naturemancer

Devlog

• Low Poly Forest
  February 11, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I changed out the mega scan trees for low poly trees because it was crashing my frame rate. I was able to get 1600 plants before things started choking now instead of 150. I also added a debug overrid... Continue reading
• Blight
  February 10, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  Did some clean up today and deleted a lot of variables from past experiments. I also added a blight mushrooms that blights the plants. That's what the dead plants are that show up... Continue reading
• Let It Grow
  February 09, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  Made it where plants now don't delete themselves when they hit max growth because that was silly. Now the forest grows. I also turned off the timer when they hit max growth to help with perf and there... Continue reading
• Fox Attack
  February 07, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  So much better than last night. So i figured out that the move to was failing because I was giving it an actor that wasn't on the nav mesh. So I projected the actor location to the nav mesh and that f... Continue reading
• Move To Tree
  February 06, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I got the fox to move to the plants. for some reason it keeps sitting there and not moving on. it says it's stuck on the movement node. it isn't completing. I don't know why. Also the montage sometime... Continue reading
• FoxyMovy
  February 04, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I created the fox anim blueprint and made the blendspace. Slotted in the animations. Created the AI controller / behavior tree / black board / EQS query. Spent 40 minutes figuring out that my fox char... Continue reading
• Habitat
  February 03, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I added the concept of a habitat. Right now it's really simple but the idea is you would need to get the right assortment of plants to make a good habitat for a group of animals. Right now it's just c... Continue reading
• Debug Speed
  January 24, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I added the ability to speed of the growth of the plants by whatever amount I want. Turns out when you go x100 and too many plants grow I get an infinite loop. So that's fun... Continue reading
• Plant Nutrition
  January 23, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I changed it so that instead of it just counting the number of plants it now has a nutrition that is per plant stage. this will let me control it more precisely by letting me change it per stage. I al... Continue reading
• Plant Refactor
  January 21, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  This one was a big clean up to make it cleaner for me going forward. Instead of defining all stages for all plants now the stages are in an array so that if one plant only has one stage it doesn't hav... Continue reading
• Plants Are Friends
  January 16, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I changed it so that now plants are considered nutrients not food. So the tree isn't directly eating them. Also the concept that some plants need to get nutrients from others... Continue reading
• Tree Eat Plants
  January 11, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I'm making it where plants can eat other plants. So the tree is eating the smaller shrubs. I also gave the trees different eating rates so now it's not so uniform... Continue reading
• Making Flowers
  January 10, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  Added the ability for player to spawn flowers. I think this will end up being the base thing needed for plants to grow in the game. Probably won't be a flower in the end... Continue reading
• Ruin VFX
  January 08, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I added vfx when you get trees to the rock ruins and once you get all three the vfx on the door happens. This will give the player their first power. This also adds the logic to do the checking for th... Continue reading
• Moving Mushrooms
  January 06, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  Turned the plants into pawns so that they can have a behavior tree and easy movement. Added a new ruin that moves plants to designated actors. Using floating movement for now since the mushrooms don't... Continue reading
• Grab UI
  January 06, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I added a grab UI on the tree so it's a little more clear what's happening. I also rescaled the landscape to what I think it's supposed to be... Continue reading
• Pick It Up
  January 04, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  Added the ability for the player to pick up plants. Will need to limit it eventually but for now i'm just letting anything go... Continue reading
• Clean Up Day
  January 04, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  After making the new landscape I added back the trees and start and ruins. Then I made a house and added a little fire... Continue reading
• Landscape Layer Masks
  January 03, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  Oh my gosh i finally figured out how to make landscape layers follow a mask. It was so easy but like everything it took me forever to figure out the right question to ask... Continue reading
• Gaea Landscape Island
  January 03, 2025 by Steven Cooney

  I've been trying to learn gaea for a bit. I tried making an island from mountains and from the island node. neither of which i liked that much. I was able to make it by drawing my own island and apply... Continue reading
• A Hud Exists
  December 31, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  ok now there is a hud for displaying some text so there can be a story and wut not... Continue reading
• Changeable Bubble
  December 30, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Added the ability to change the scale curve on the timeline when the bubble spawns... Continue reading
• Alter Bubble
  December 30, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Added a time bubble to the ruin alter. This will add some time pressure to the player. Also fixed the sign BP by making it a UMG widget instead of a text render. that made the text wrapping work... Continue reading
• Fixed Forest
  December 28, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Fixed the forest trees going through the landscape by turning on sweep and also moving them forward then down. otherwise they got stuck in the landscape. I also added a sign so that I can start puttin... Continue reading
• Moving Forest
  December 28, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Made the trees move to try to intercept the player. still a work in progress but it's almost working. I'm having some problems with where to place the tree as you can see with it floating... Continue reading
• Arch Ruin Take 1
  December 25, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  This is the initial set up for the first challenge in the game with some cool ruins... Continue reading
• Landscape Setup
  December 23, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Got a real landscape in and set up the virtual textures... Continue reading
• Tree Bug Fixing
  December 23, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Now that I have two trees I had some bugs to fix. First needed to make it where it spawned the correct tree according to type. Also my line cast wasn't hitting the tree because of collision so I just... Continue reading
• Upgrade to Unreal 5.5
  December 23, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Upgrading from 5.4 to 5.5 to allow for some asset use... Continue reading
• New Tree And Bubble
  December 21, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Added a timeline for the bubble growth, feels a lot more dynamic. Also figured out how to use the quixel trees. They look pretty nice. although they are a lot more expensive so i'll need to figure tha... Continue reading
• Bubble Spawner
  December 20, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I realized the problem with my plant code is that I was handling too many different things at the same time. I separated out initialize (called at construction), begin play, and grow that stabalized i... Continue reading
• Magic Bubble
  December 19, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I fixed the seed problem by telling the plant if it spawned as a seed or tree. Then i had much confusion with why the plants were floating and why the collision of the landscape doesn't seem to be wor... Continue reading
• Well Those Are Not Seeds
  December 18, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I updated the seeds so that they now spawn with pcg. had to fix an annoying scaling issue. Then i updated it so that the physics keeps going until they are trees. Then I added a line cast to make sure... Continue reading
• Infinite Whoops
  December 17, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I want to use a PCG graph to sample the surface of the static mesh to place the seeds on the tree. I seem to have hit a little infinite loop... maybe I shouldn't have picked the force generation butto... Continue reading
• Grow Around Player
  December 16, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I changed the growing so that it happens around the player instead of everything universally. The forest looks much more varied now. To do that I had to add a can grow function to the plant interface... Continue reading
• The Forest Grows
  December 12, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I updated the plant system to use a data table instead of an array so that the data won't just disappear on me. I also added seeds that can make more trees so now the forest can populate itself. I see... Continue reading
• Plant Stages
  December 10, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I set it up so that there are 4 stages. Seed, Sapling, Mature, Decaying. They change the static mesh based on the stage and scale appropriately. To give the idea of growth... Continue reading
• Growing Fast
  December 08, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  Now they can scale up when you want them too. Took me way to long to figure out that the reason my inputs weren't working was because I wasn't spawning the character I thought I was... Continue reading
• Starting A New One
  December 08, 2024 by Steven Cooney

  I'm starting a new game. Stay tuned... Continue reading