The project is still alive.

New update after a looong time!

The player character has been improved, with a new hair and new shaders for the skin and the hair.

Different lighting:

The hair material uses a modified simplified version of the Content Examples one, for a more dinamic look:

(4mb limit for gifs PepeHands)

The skin material is just basic, with subsurface profile added:

The subsurface setting really pays off in high contrast lighting conditions.

Meanwhile I've been working on the animation blueprint/movement system. Initially I was only making the animations but the programmers were taking too long so I decided to do it myself:

Don't forget to turn up the quality or else it will be blurry:

It's more or less the complete player movement functionality, with actions like jumping, sneaking, combat stance, rolling, transitioning etc.

There are 3 main stances, Normal, Combat and Sneaking. The player moves differently in each and you can transition from one another while stationary or moving as well.

The combat stance has a rolling mechanic, you can roll in every direction and can change direction while rolling. Additionally, the camera becomes third person while rolling. This is a feature I want to explore further in the future ( possible special attacks that will transition into third person and back).

I've been focusing a lot on having everything clean and working smoothly. The character speed is consistent depending on what direction you move, the transitions and the actions are unbreakable (so far). If only there was a capable programmer that could help the code become cleaner as well.

For the anim blueprint I have a separate state machine for the Legs animations, so that the torso animations are independent and in the future you can attack while moving in any direction or being stationary or in any stance.

Initially I started with one state machine for the whole thing:

But it got too clogged, so after some reworks eventually I ended up with having 3 separate nested state machines for the 3 stances, with transition anim nodes in between them (current setup suggested by a programmer):

The Sneak, Normal and KM nodes have state machines nested in them. So far it works flawlessly.

That's it for the first update in a year, currently prepping up for another programmer search.

(so if you are/know a capable programmer with UE4 experience and dig this, hit me up)

There are some other features in the works, coming soon, regardless.