Category: Research

I enjoyed playing Destiny 1 back in the day when it featured Lootcave gameplay. I thought it would be a great way to explore data driven gameplay by trying to re-creating the Lootcave phenomenon.

I wanted to learn how to use an external Excel spreadsheet as input to Unreal Engine. I wanted to control as much as possible using this spreadsheet, such as items, balancing and loot tables.

Purpose of this project was to learn how to use:

• Multiple maps and switching between them.
• Data driven game design and balancing.
• Item database.
• Loot tables.
• Enemy attributes.

The project was built around the principle of being able to extend, maintain and tweak it with more levels, items and monster types. All these things can be done really quickly from an Excel spreadsheet without the involvement of programmers. A simple re-import of the Excel sheet is enough.

Realtime VFX artists can use Motion Vector frame blending together with a 2D lookup texture to achieve higher amount of detail using less resources. These advanced shader techniques offer an efficient way to save texture memory and shader instructions.

A looping texture offer ~infinite particle lifespans and slower texture playblack rate. My example texture is a 32 frames and its playback speed can easily be slowed down to 5% without sacrificing visuals.

Required Textures:

• Main texture, BC5 two channel greyscale
• Motion Vectors, uncompressed
• Linear2D gradient lookup map, RGBA 256×256

Main Texture source is a 32 frame animation created in FumeFX. Motion Vectors came rendered straight out of FumeFX with no optical flow post-process. Sequence made looping using a simple crossfade in After effects.

This shader is created from the inspiration from Klemenz Lozar’s blog post about Motion Vector frame blending.
LINK

Another source of inspiration was Simon Trümpler’s blog post about Fallout 4’s clever use of 2D gradients:
LINK