The UE4 remake continues....

[irjayjay]

Continuing on the thread about my Hardwar remake.
I thought this warranted a new thread, the old one was 9 pages long already.



If you don't know yet, I'm busy rebuilding the game, though not staying true to Canon, but a lot of the major gameplay elements are there.

To see the latest progress, check out my blog or YouTube channel below:
JJ's Blog
JJ's YouTube Channel

I'll also post here every now and then to seek input and get a general idea of what you all think.

[irjayjay]

Here's some of the things I've been busy with since my last video, expect a video on it soon.

• Ship repair from building menu - yes, you can now repair your ship in a building, it says it right here in the flight manual.
• RADAR update - Only ships with their radars on will now show up on your radar, also had to do a lot of coding to make it cheater proof.
• New ship added to the game - The Gypsy - See screenshots on my blog. It'll replace my placeholder Silver Y as the game's entry-level ship. It has an interior now, so you get to look through the windows at the pilot's seat and consoles.
  
• Screen shake - when you bump into things or fly too fast, your ship will start shaking, mainly because it's a piece of scrap, held together by bubblegum and stolen comms wiring.
  
• Better camera lag - in third person the ship will move more dynamically and the camera will catch up to its movement a split second later - used to be very jerky.
• Jet trails - yeah, homeworld styled jet trails on ships and missiles. Makes it easier to spot other ships and looks darn cool!
• Jet particles - as your throttle increases, you'll see a bigger jet coming out the rear engine, cool right?
• Fixed or at least improved the pitch movement - previously this was directly bound to the mouse, so you could move tilt your ship as fast as you could move your mouse.
• Fixed throttle movement to be easier to control - you basically control thrust, not the ship speed. If you're at full thrust, it still takes a while for the ship to match the speed at the thrust. Also added air resistance into the mix with the new formula - the faster you go, the less effect your thrust has, basically.
• Tried to get dynamic fog working... but alas, the tutorial I followed was for an older version of the engine. I'd love for it to be foggy most of the time, but now and then have clear area, so you get to see what everything looks like without fog, for a little bit.

Wow... looking at this list now, that's a ton!

Next up:

• Creating more weapons for the test game - mainly want to see what people think of the weapons, there'll be way more than in the original, which should make for more strategic dogfights.
• Targeting system - you can already target someone, but there's no reticule or feedback to the player about who they targeted. Need to implement the UI for this.
• Figuring out how to package the game for testing
• Ship chassis class - a component you can fit on your ship that determines it's armour, weight, air resistance, turn rate, components that can be fitted to the ship, etc. (A ship could have a light chassis that has low armour, but allows for faster turning and less air resistance, as an example)
• Modular buildings or procedural buildings - I don't have time to model a bunch of unique buildings, so I'm hoping I can write some code to do it for me. Very rough idea of combining various shapes to make interesting cyberpunk structures.
• Better crosshairs and aiming - Crosshairs currently are just in the middle of the screen, also the original game had all the projectiles home in on targets, I might need to do the same, to narrow the skill gap between noobs and pros.
• Player names and name tags - Third person characters will have names, so you can walk up to the pilot who just shot you down, and do nothing - because there's no third person combat... yet.
• Better ship collisions - currently ships just bounce when they hit something. It should be possible to slide along a wall if you keep contact with it --it should simply add resistance to your movement, not bounce you back the whole time.
• Drones - specifically a third person drone(yeah, how else did you think you get a third person view of your ship? There's a drone following you, which you need to buy) and the good ol' salvage drone - now player controlled(race your way to the loot before your enemies and hit auto return to dock the drone again) It's a work in progress in my mind. Maybe even knock other drones out of the way...

Not saying I'll do all of these, but I'll work my way down the list.

[irjayjay]

Latest progress video is up:

[irjayjay]

[irjayjay]

[irjayjay]

Currently working on procedural building generation.
I've got the basics down, just need to test if my simplified version works. There's a building seed class, which generates a building where it gets spawned... problem is, I don't know how to spawn a building seed yet, will research a little and implement.

I've also finally got the UI ship targeting reticule working - it now follows the enemy ship around the screen, making it easier to spot them in your viewport.
I need to still get this to pull in other data like player name and ship data. For now I won't have a ship portrait showing on the HUD as it used to in the original, will see if I can add it later, but it's not very straightforward.

[Denacity]

It's a bit of an old school approach, but you might be able to make a list of X,Y (Z?) coordinates where buildings *could be* and the game randomly decides to place a building there, or not, but if it does then it goes through the random building generator.

Of course how to setup the function of the buildings after the world generates them is a whole other discussion.

[irjayjay]

Basically I need to point and click in the editor and then it should pop a building into existence. Never made an editor tool like that before.

[bytraper1]

Hey dude, im really happy to see this game getting some love!
I've watched the various attempts over the years to add more to the game and have watched the remakes over the years and they always seem to start off with a lot of enthusiasm but then sadly they fade away.
It's a shame that when the projects fall by the wayside all the work to get them to that point is lost so the reigns can't be picked up by someone that can take them that little bit further.

You always hope that one will push that little bit further and gain enough momentum to bring more people in to help make it a finished product and it's that spirit which keeps me coming back here year after year!
I don't visit as much as I used to because I lost hope that there would ever be a remake that was even close to being completed, but Im pleasantly surprised at just how much you've gotten working!

I've lost count of how many forums I've visited as this site has changed hosts and software over the years!

I was quite excited to see what you have achieved so far and you seem to be keeping it real and grounded and you have a fair idea of what you can achieve and what you've done so far is amazing!

I still remember finding this game in the clearance bin many years ago for ten dollars but it was the most amazing game I'd played in a long long time.

I honestly didn't hold much hope for the game because I'd never heard of it, but boy was I wrong! I must have put a few thousand hours on the game over the next year and i played it until I could no longer run it on my machine due to it being too old. I always hoped that there would be a sequel and I always hope that someone would love it enough to remake it as their own. But i was sad when software refinery closed down.

Anyway, is it possible to donate to this project?

[irjayjay]

Sorry I just saw your post now. Currently not taking donations as I still have a day job. If I had something that money could solve, I would happily accept!

I've thought about getting a kickstarter going, but currently I don't have anything visually appealing to show people and I find marketing/video making really tiresome.
Would be great if I could find someone who'd be willing to make gifs for twitter, etc. just to get the word out and get a community running. I feel like my time is better spent developing.

I must say, development has slowed down quite a bit.. mostly because I have a girlfriend now. She loves that I'm building a game though, so she's not keen on stopping me, which is great.
I tend to get the most work done when I'm on holiday. Built half of what you see today during my December holiday.

Let me post again for a progress update.

[irjayjay]

Progress update(no video, sorry):

Done-ish:

• Procedural buildings - complete for the most part, works in-editor, I simply place a building seed, click generate, and a random sized building pops up, makes making cities easier.
• Materials/shaders - been playing around with textures/materials/shaders, trying to get the most performant materials for the game, especially for glass(transparency costs a lot!) I now have a fair bit of shaders for basic materials. Mostly stolen and modified from the free Unreal car materials pack
• Controls were revamped and are super smooth!! This game runs like a dream now! Imagine a first person shooter's controls where space makes you strafe up and shift makes you strafe down, but in Hardwar! Yes, that's right, you can now strafe your moth up/down/left/right, 5 degrees of freedom!
• Pilot naming - this has got me beat, still struggling to get it working nicely. Sure I can give your player the same name as your PC, but who wants to be called Desktop-BR34ASDAFS? If I can get this working, it'll allow me to add other player customizations too, like ship colours, or pilot colours. So this is what I'm focusing on now.
  

Next:

• Basic join/create game menu
• Respawn and scoring logic - first test version will be a deathmatch-style game, just for testing weapons/controls/buying/repairing
• Test map - just a basic map with some stores with enough stock to last most of the deathmatch
• Feedback mechanism - a way for players to report bugs, possibly analytics for me to see which weapons/etc. were favoured.
• Packaging the game, game-keys, niceties.

Great, hope that's enough info for now, remember to join the discord server if you'd like to give input or poke me when I haven't updated the forum in a while.

discord.gg/J2Q2CVdjsp

[irjayjay]

New video, finally:

[Pilot]

Great work, your perseverance is really showing.

EDIT:

May 10, 2021 12:15:09 GMT -5 irjayjay said:

I've thought about getting a kickstarter going, but currently I don't have anything visually appealing to show people and I find marketing/video making really tiresome.
Would be great if I could find someone who'd be willing to make gifs for twitter, etc. just to get the word out and get a community running. I feel like my time is better spent developing.

I'd like to recommend an awesome opensource tool/program called, ShareX. It allows you to capture screenshots, video, gifs from your desktop, running application or all of your monitors, and allows you to upload (I don't use this function myself) or auto-upload screenshots to various platforms, or custom ones, as long as you have entered the login details.

getsharex.com/

[wez]

Damn I was just asking myself at what point should I stop hosting www.hardwar.info and of course zedo.hardwar.info .. The answer is hardwar will never die

Impressive work, seeing those hangar doors open and the ship fly in

[sushi]

You're amazing ! When time will come I'd like to translate everything into French.
Very impressive !