This Sprint like a lot of the last couple was mostly behind the scenes as the migration away from AWS to local SAV files was the main focus of the efforts. Current Avatar Appearance, Avatar Inventory & Current Player Props databases were all moved to local SAV files. This only leaves DJ Light Cues and Light Shows left in AWS and they are scheduled for migration next sprint.
The second major task completed this Sprint was the moving of Maps from 3d artist folders to a folder structure that represents the new structure of the game. All maps and their related assets were moved into a folder structure that represented the Regions and the Venues within the Regions. Here is a screen shot of the new folder structures within the content folder. Also notice the color coding of the folders with Green representing 3d artist folders, Yellow meaning 3d artist but proceed with caution and Red representing Developer folders.
Folders that have not been started have the same type of folder structure set up for them as the folders of existing built maps. So for example, Alien Planet is a planned Venue in the Space Region. If you go into the Alien Planet it has all the folder structure for meshes, materials, textures, etc, etc, as well as, a folder for the map along with a starting map for Alien Planet that is the old DMX template. Here is an example of the Alien Planet data structure with the initial map being the template.
Each map now has a Primary Asset Label (PAL) file associated with it. The PAL file is a file that controls the Asset Manager in Unreal Engine. We use the Primary Asset Manager to package up the project so that the assets associated with a given map (say the Rave Cave) are combined into a pak file for that given map. That means that the Rave Cave map and supporting meshes, materials, textures, etc end up in a Rave Cave Pak file when building the project. The pak file is a compressed file much like a zip file is. Basically then the build file that is submitted to Steam is an executable with the game logic in it and a set of pak files (1 for each map/level) as defined by the PAL file. So eventually in the game distribution file from Steam will be an executable an 36 map pak files along with another catch all pak file for all assets not in the maps (i.e. avatars, animations, etc). So an executable and 37 compressed pak files are in the distribution. The pak file is much like the .bag files in games like Sansar. This is important for myMO in distribution because when a game player gets a new release/update for myMO it will only get a new pak file if the pak file changed. For example, if the Rave Cave was not changed during the latest update the player would not get pushed the Rave Cave pak file again as they already have it on their hard drive. This dividing up of the game this way will make the update cycle much quicker and less painful for everyone.
In this case, the PAL for rave cave assigned chunk id 5400 for the contents in the Rave Cave Map file.
This resulted in the file pakchunk5400-WindowsNoEditor.pak being created by the build processing. This file has all the contents associated with the Rave Cave. It is 1.12 GB in size.
The file pakchunk0-WindowsNoEditor.pak is the catch all file for everything that is not map related in the game. It is currently around 5.2GB in size.
So, basically if you are going to build a map for the game you will download the new unreal project that will be in the group shared area. It is quite big as it is the whole playable game with all the maps in it at this time. We may have to play around some about the best workflow of map/level makers and development, but, the plan is that you would be able to use this first download for a number of months before worrying about having to replace it with a new one. Time will tell how well that might work. Again we will only find out the best way to do this …. well …. by actually doing it a few times.
