BIOASSHARD UPDATE 12/25/2025 & MERRY CHRISTMAS (Patreon)

Hello everyone!First and foremost: Merry Christmas!

Edit: I forgot to add the poll 😅

Lately, there’s more silent than usual, but as mentioned in the previous report, we keep working on it non-stop (like not even taking weekends or holidays to rest a bit…)We’ve been making progress overall. But mainly on two areas:Enemies and the Chapter 1 areas.

There has been a lot of stuff done but I want to mention the worst parts I faced with the enemies 😅- The Path Navigation core plugin for the AI Controller of the enemies got corrupted: I didn’t even know this was possible, since this is not something I did implement myself but rather a default feature I only changed a few properties in back in the Arena times. But yeah, that’s game dev for you, you can’t expect everything to work as it should, even less default engine -added by Epic- features…

So, I had to recreate it from scratch, a new one and reimplement it, changing ALL its uses across the whole project for the new one… But I took this chance to improve some code and specially simplify it by a lot while maintaining all its previous features plus some other new ones, so, as they say “all’s well that ends well”, right?

- Optimizing the enemies even more had to be done manually in its entirety: Previous optimization steps like importing all the LODs for enemies, clothes, hairs… I managed to automate them using “blutilities” and/or python code. But the last step, that was creating more optimized versions of the used shaders for the LODs and apply them to all the enemies and their accessories, I had to eat it entirely and make it by hand… 😭

So, I created like 4 variants of every shader used by the enemies, progressively taking out features to make then lighter, like getting rid of effects, maps like normal, ambient occlusion, specular, roughness, metallic and even turning them unlit for the last LOD (since this LOD is used for when the enemies are far away, there’s no need for them to be affected by light which reduces by a ton all the shader calculations). And this was the faster part. Then I had to go, mesh by mesh adding new material slots for every new material (shader) created, changing from LOD to LOD (8 for almost everything and “only” 4 for the rest) and swapping the currently used slots for the new ones.

I tried to automate it, but was impossible, since Epic doesn’t allow to externally set material slots in skeletal meshes (they allow it in static meshes but not in skeletal ones) to avoid mesh corruption (how funny of them taking this measure here and not for the Path Nav plugin, huh).But well, I finally got rid of that as well, and finished with the enemy optimizations (for good I hope).

And because these ate so much time, I was unable to get to the animation part yet. Which is what I have to do now, while finishing some changes to the dismemberment system.Now, I want to mention two things:First is that you can vote (please do so) in the poll to let us know your sincere opinion on this matter about enemies crawling.And second, I’ll be making the first test dev stream in a couple days, focused on animations, where you’ll be able to see the process I follow and the work it takes. It’s been ages since we mentioned the possibility of making these streams and I didn’t want to let the year end without making at least one. So, if you're interested in watching some bts content, join me this Saturday at around 17:30 / 18:00 GMT in Picarto.And that’s going to do it for this report.

I’ll let you know when the streaming is going to happen and give you the link to access it directly. So, stay tune 😁And now, time to get back to work!

But before leaving, here's a little present for you from Mr.VersusX

Much love everyone 💖Until next time 😊.-Meguido