Is it too late to have our level set in the desert?

Trees! Of course it's the trees because trees were sent to punish game artists for their sins. We got back this week and located one of the main problems with our lag and frame rate issue which turned out to be the alphas on the trees, the water shader is also pretty engine heavy but it mainly the trees fault. So what's the solution to that? Less leaf planes altogether or try to maintain the look of density by putting more branches onto the alpha planes. Regardless either on off these options mean revisiting the trees and changing them again.

So we've located the problem, that's a start. As for the level...

Looking pretty good I think. The work everyone did over the Easter went in, Dominic's been working on scripting in the puzzles and the end is in sight but we still have pretty big to do list and there are some things we've accepted probably won't get done for the DMU hand in such as having the Mad Hatter over at the tea party but we aren't too worried about that.

Importing the palace brought up the Unreal 'Degenerate tangent base' error but after all the trouble when had with this and Mark's archway we were prepared for it this time. Back over in 3D Studio I simply attached the palace to a quickly drawn box mesh, deleted the box and re-exported the palace and all fixed. There was still an incorrect shading issue but I fixed that by increasing the light map resolution up from 64 to 128.

The main worry is that it's not completely playable yet, some puzzles aren't in and so the game isn't set up to let you into the gardens or end the game so that's our biggest problem currently. This is all Dominic's work since this is a level of scripting at is just sailing over our heads so we can't even help. He assures us it will be done and he's fast and good at it so we aren't particularly concerned.

This week was also the presentations so that was..something. I'd spent all Easter worrying what I could present at would be three minutes of cool and funny information, then I remembered that I'm a art history and Ancient Greek civilisation nerd and really should just embrace that. So I gave a presentation on the three stages of Greek sculpture, though an extremely butchered one as fitting an era into under a minute is harder than I expected but it went ok, my timings were mostly on track and I didn't have to throw up afterward so a big improvement on last year at least. 

Everyone else gave a good show too, lots of broad subjects and I left with new knowledge of the genetics of horse colouration and a few more interesting facts about slugs under my belt so in my eyes, it was a good day.