The Derelict Station

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since the last post and there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on!

I finally have a new video of the Police Station map for you all! Some of you will probably recognize a few of the areas displayed and how much it’s been expanded upon. This map took longer, and I mean WAY longer than I had originally anticipated to fix up. This was the first map I ever built in UE4 (ages ago) and had constructed most of it out of BSP because I was still using the workflow I did from UE2.5. Though BSP has its advantages, I would find out later that it did not work well with the dynamic lighting system I had implemented so every map after this one was created 100% out of staticmeshes.

When I came back to fix this map a couple months ago,  I had to actually go in and replace every single piece of BSP one by one. I couldn’t convert the BSP structures to staticmesh because the building was of a modular nature so I had to line up the new staticmesh walls with the BSP walls, scale and shape it as needed. To say that this was an excercise in tedium is an understatement.

Another thing I forgot was that over time I had changed the scale of the other maps to accomodate the changes to the playercharacter’s size and height. Just imagine the forehead-slapping moment when I realized that I would also have to rescale the entire layout of the map and its structures and realign every single decorative mesh as well! The good news is that this is the only map that I had to do this to. Whew!!

There have been a few changes under the hood to make things run faster and it’s much more optimized than before but despite my best efforts, do remember that there is still a ton of shit going on and that all lighting is dynamic so you will still need a fairly strong computer to run it smoothly. I’m using the same PC build I got in 2015 and it runs alright so hopefully most people won’t have a problem with anything after then.

You can check out the video here:

I also have a weapon video uploaded in case you missed that one:

I’ve changed some gameplay mechanics that didn’t work as well as they did in my head and even added a couple suggestions from the community. I won’t go into depth here about each change I’ve made but if you’ve joined the Discord channel you should have some idea.

Speaking of the fan community, a great fellow by the name of Jonathan Sheridan made a very indepth video about the Out Of Hell mod! And when I say indepth, I mean it’s a thoughtful examination of the lore, backstory, artstyle, atmosphere and just way too many other things that I could list here. It’s a detailed, insightful video and now includes an english translation so I highly recommend you check it out! You can watch it here:

I am also in talks with a composer to create a custom soundtrack for Out Of Hell and I’ll let you all know how it turns out as soon as I can. I don’t want to use stock music anymore (turns out the stock music song I used for the intro was also used in the game Manhunt! I never played either of those games so I never knew until a kind person pointed it out) so I started the search for someone that could create the style that I’m after. I’ll post more information about this soon!

Though I’ve mentioned in the past that the goal for release is Halloween 2022, I’m already getting a bit nervous about that date. Considering how long it took me to fix the Police Station map I’m just afraid I’m going to run into some other problem or issue that’s going to eat up time (and I’ve run into several already) Since I also want to spend a few months on testing, that essentially gives me about 9 months from now. I’m going to keep hammering away like a madman and while I’m going to remain hopeful, I do not want you to get you hopes up if I may need to extend the date later on so just an early heads up!

That’s it for now folks, if you want to kill some time between updates remember to drop into the Discord channel and lurk! I usually make small updates there and it also enables you to yell at me to hurry my ass up in realtime! 🙂