February 13, 2015

Marketplace Content Release

News

By Jon Jones

It's time for another Marketplace content release! Let's jump right in.

ScreenFX Distortions and Blurs by Dest Studio is a pack I've been eager to see published to the Marketplace. This is two groups of post-processing materials that simulate the user's screen covered in water droplets, water distortion, frost effects, and a variety of cool screen distortion effects. Check out the video!

Hey turn based strategy game developers, check this out! Turn Based Strategy Grids by Zhi Kang Shao is a Blueprint system that provides developers of turn based strategy games with logic for representing and querying 2D grid worlds, with a focus on computing action grids to efficiently store all pathing and attack options availale to a unit during its current turn. It's used for efficiently retrieving the shortest paths to any reachable tile, displaying movement and attack options available to the selected unit, and for providing AI units with a search function to retrieve a set or subset of valid actions, which can then be processed by your high level AI controller. This is another great example of the power of Blueprints. Watch the video to see how it works!

C-Media has returned with Advanced Displacement Landscape Materials, a spiffy and beautiful way to bring your landscape materials to life using a tesselated displacement material designed specifically for use with Landscape Actors. This allows you to blend between 3 'texture sets,' as well as adjusting parameters for each individual 'texture set' via instanced values. Notably, the setup of this material fixes the issues caused by using a standard tesselation material on a Landscape Actor and allows you to control LOD of the tesselation without interfering with the Landscape Actor's own LOD. Also, it looks great. Go look!

Wood is a useful material. People build things out of it to put other things into, on top of, next to, under, or near. It's the kind of world we live in, and the Wooden Storage Pack by HostileAssets is bringing that reality to us! Crates, pallets, shelving, you name it, and there are 18 different kinds of them for a wide range of possible usage cases. Have a look and find something you like!

If you're looking for stunning background mountains for your game, go check out Realistic Mountain Landscapes by Gkan Games. It's a set of four 15km x 15km terrain maps with eighteen 2k textures and four optional landscape materials. They're pretty. Go have a look!

It's a jungle out there. Or at least, it could be, if you're using the Low Poly Foliage Jungle Pack by Dokyo! This is a set of modular foliage for use in low-poly jungle environments and it includes animated wind, subsurface and mobile materials, and tree collision.

Here's a helpful one with a great layout. Behold 100+ MuzzleFlash Library by W3 Studios, a huge set of muzzle flashes for multiple weapon types -- bullet, energy, mini-guns -- in single-shot and continuous fire configurations, as well as a variety of different scales. Basically, if your game has a weapon that shoots anything, you can find something you need in here. Check out the video!

Speaking of weapons, they should sound as great as they look. To help with that, I'd like to point you toward Futuristic Weapons And Mechs by Levan Nadashvili. This is a set of 52 WAV files and 38 sound cues for futuristic weapons like an Alien Assault Rifle, Blaster Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Plasma Submachine Gun, and an Energetic Mini Cannon, each with a long firing burst, burst loop, four versions of short burst, and four versions of single shot. In addition to that, the pack contains sounds for mechanical troopers and robots including footsteps, activation, deactivation, turn, start and stop walking, engine spin-ups, and many more. Audio can make or break a game, so give these a listen!

Does your game have vehicles? The Dynamic Car Paint Material System by Stimpanzee has an impressive collection of powerful PBR-safe materials with dozens of parameters to get your car paint, carbon fiber, or glass to look amazing through fine control of individual paint layers, dynamic reflections, and performance scaling. It includes a powerful color masking system that allows multi-paint color schemes, decals, and even control over grunge and rusted areas with vertex colors. Definitely check out the screenshots below.

That's all for this week. Next week there won't be a Marketplace content release due to store maintenance, but we'll be back on February 25 with more! See you all soon.