✨Star Atlas - Galia Deep Dive 🧐 Join gameplay engineer Brad Warren, as he explains how the game systems tech behind Galia, @StarAtlas' open universe MMO works 👀 Nested Level Streaming 🔸Nested level streaming is a technique to control when levels are streamed in and out. We can use different triggers such as distance, view angle, or opening a door. 🔸These levels are nested within each other. IE, Sector > Planet > POI 🔸This combines with Unreal's native world partition system that dynamically loads in actors based on size and proximity Directional Gravity 🔸All game engines assume that gravity always pulls 'down'(-Z in Unreal's case). We needed to come up with a custom solution for planets and space stations 🔸We built a system of gravity volumes that talk to character movement component as well as the ship movement component 🔸When a player or ship enters a gravity volume, it tells them the direction of the gravity. In the case of a planet, it updates every frame as they traverse the planet 🔸Future improvement will include adding gravity magnitude, such as zero-g in space, lower-g on moons, and higher-g on large planets Gameplay Feature: Subwarp Travel 🔸Space is big. Even scaled down, space takes a very long time to traverse. We needed a mode of travel for traversing planets and sectors 🔸Sub Warp is a third flight mode, alongside Hover and flight modes 🔸We want travel times in general to be much faster than other games 🔸Sub Warp travel costs fuel. Fuel can be purchased at landing zones 🔸Speed and Spool Time will be stats of the Sub Warp Drive component Travel between Sectors via Sub Warp or Gates (Star Path) Ship AI (Reinforced Learning) 🔸For our ship AI we decided to go with Reinforced Learning via neural network 🔸Agents perform actions as part of an iteration (500+ actions) 🔸At the end of the iteration, agents receive points based on a reward system 🔸Based on the number of points the agent received, a neural network decides if the actions were correct or not 🔸If the actions were correct, the system adjusts the weights to make that behavior more likely Dialog And Mission System 🔸State Tree based. Easy for designers to set up and see the flow 🔸Tight integration. Dialog lines can trigger quest steps and vice versa 🔸Each line of dialog can be assigned animations (body and facial), and a desired camera shot (wide, closeup, over the shoulder, etc) 🔸Easily add tasks such as Eliminate Target, Go To Location, Collect, Talk To, etc. Planet Tech 🔸Recently hired an engineer exclusively for planet tech 🔸Real-time planet generation, all running on the GPU 🔸Biome support (based on temperature, humidity and altitude) 🔸Procedural foliage scattering of biomes 🔸Procedural Planetary Clouds 🔸Basic Oceans 🔸Terrain modification for level artists #WeAreStarAtlas #Solana #Gamefi #P2E #NFTs #Crypto #Web3Gaming #UE5 @solana @superteam