Jumped back into unreal but I’m heavily procrastinating the game parts so I started messing with some of the environment tools in unreal. Specifically I’ve been poking at the grass setup tools (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/grass-quick-start-in-unreal-engine). Not too complicated essentially, your environment drives a few inputs and outputs in your landscape material.

So I whipped up a quick ground texture in gimp:

Where each layer is a bit more grass ontop of the dirt:

Then I whipped up two quick grass and tree models in blender.

Then once you import both into unreal you can tie everything together using a “LandscapeGrassType” which is just a data holder for what you consider grass:

Then throw it into your material

The final result was surprisingly good. Obviously I could add more grass, touch up the ground texture, make a tree that doesn’t look like a plastic pylon. But I’m dumbfounded how far this stuff has come along from unreal 4.

I have a strong feeling you’re straight up not supposed to use this system to add trees (You can see in the video above that the bullets don’t collide with the trees). But I’m still happy at least that the workflow is quite simple.

Drawing onto the landscape is very easy also, If I wanted to make a path I can just draw the rock layer in a quick line like in the video above.

Now to the actual game stuff I’m thinking my next change into game-play will be moving things closer to kind of a pseudo helldivers mission where:
1.) Players spawn on a big map
2.) Enemies spawn a wave to attack the central spawn and players fight to survive/save the base
3.) Once the enemy wave is over players will leave the base to try to destroy spawners
4.) The next wave starts, the players run back to base and restock
5.) Rinse and repeat for all spawners
5.) Once the players destroy all the spawners a boss wave starts
6.)Players defeat the boss and the game ends.

Seems like a reasonable goal, it also sounds like a multiplayer game but honestly I dont wanna go down that rabbit hole yet. I have half of a multiplayer game made from awhile ago which seems like a good idea but it requires you to modify the engine build to pull in steamworks. My goal here is still to avoid using c/c++ so I can focus on just assets until I REALLY need to optimize. In addition making 3rd person models will probably require me to re-make a bunch of the blueprints which sounds horrible at this stage.