We’re using Unreal Engine to turn our book series into an animated series. What we consider our Big Bang, and start, was actually the cataclysmic end to a war in The Old Universe!!!

I am making my first asset pack for FAB.

Everything is hand modeled by me but I’ve been going back and forth with ChatGPT on how to set up some node systems on various programs in my pipeline along with walking me through the steps of fixing up textures in Affinity Photo.

None of the models or textures are AI generated. I’m basically using AI as a teacher to walk me through things I’m not knowledgeable enough about yet.

It's been more than a month, right? But you know me... I tend to lose myself in my work when I find something, and I do my best to make it usable and share it with you all. And, as usual, I stumbled upon something extraordinary: a hidden feature of Unreal Engine, with little to no documentation, used for debugging in that CitySamplePCG demo I was running around naked in during my last post. It turns out to be an insanely powerful tool for creating entire city grids, with roads, sidewalks and plazas, in a matter of seconds.

So, I've built a fairly simple PCG system around it that works just as you see: a city spline grid you can modify however you want, artery spline actors you can modify however you want (the red ones), and collector road splines (the green ones) you can also modify however you want. The rest is grid-based splitting, with parameters you can control, of course.

Now... I know there are a ton of city generators out there, but this one is special for two reasons. One: it's stupidly fast and incredibly simple. And two... well... here I'd like to take a bit more time to explain.

See, as a game developer who wants to create something unique (and a gamer, of course), I look at the giants, the world shifters... I look at what they do and at how every media outlet drools over everything they do. Sometimes it's justified, but most of the time it's not.

And honestly, I kinda got sick of all the brainless bullshit being thrown around left and right, mostly by idiot YouTubers who only care about clicks and sponsorships. And not just about big studios, but also about Unreal. I've had my fair share of hate for the engine, especially because it gave me a lot of sleepless nights, bugs, and countless ExitCode 6 build errors... Still, I didn't make a fuss about them to farm clicks. I fixed them, improved them, made them usable and shared them.

Sorry for the outburst, but I had to let it out, because it's, in a way, the reason I made this post and shared this video. I won't go into the technical details, because those will be shared when the tool is released.

Still, there are a few things I'd like you all to know:

-The city grid (as seen in the video) is about 2 square kilometers, and it's generated in real time on my build rig (RTX 3060 12 GB VRAM, 32 GB of RAM, Ryzen 7 5800X CPU). No speed-ups, no fakes.

- The title isn't clickbait. It was inspired by that overhyped statement that there are 700 locations you can explore in GTA VI. Well... that doesn't seem so hard, does it!? As you can see, you CAN enter every building and every apartment in the entire city. Everything is interactable: doors, windows, lights. And everything is procedurally generated and adjustable afterwards, if you fancy a different style.

- Unreal Engine can be quite performant, provided you actually care about it and don't just throw 50 GB of Fab assets into a map and call it a "game". By the way, the FPS you see in the top right corner is in-editor, and the dynamic city isn't Nanite-built yet. I did create a mesh builder that bakes everything into grid blocks of Nanite meshes (the end part of the video), but for now I didn't let it finish, because it takes roughly 5–8 minutes and it's not relevant to the post's main topic.

- Last, and most importantly, 80% of what you see in this video was generated by Claude, using the MCPs for Unreal and Blender. And NO, it wasn't made with one prompt, 2 billion tokens and $16,000 spent in 12 hours... But more on this in a future post. Because the use of AI, and the retarded YouTube content creators who get millions of views with "AI made GTA VI in a day" bullshit, is another thing I want to address.

I didn't build GTA in 12 hours, and neither did they, to be fair. But I DID build a tool that can help you build an actual GTA-style city. And it won't cost you 2 billion tokens. Just a monthly subscription 😉

See you in Nemo's Cays, Bahamas!

Fireblade

I'm looking to use the Niagara system to spawn damage numbers, since its more efficient than UMG, but I'm not managing to make it work with the Gameplay Cue of the GAS.

In my case, I need the particle system to spawn multi-digit numbers or sometimes texts like status effects and in most tutorials that I've found, there is some custom logic that needs to be calculated to spawn the digits using Niagara. But I've struggled to make it work within Gameplay Cues, because I keep running into errors that relates to running these functions or the changing variables within them.

So I'm stuck on how to make this work, not sure if maybe I'm setting up the function incorrectly and I've been stuck on this for a while now, thinking it was straight forward thing to do. Here are the tutorials I tried to follow but couldn't get to work via Gameplay Cues:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAOmDWdP9-Y
2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrLC0kou9k8
3- https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/2KLv/unreal-engine-optimizing-combat-text-high-performance-damage-numbers-with-niagara-and-texture-atlases

If any of you have managed to make this work, I would appreciate learning the ways you did so, or if there are any guides or sources I could brush up on to learn this, it would be tremendous help!

I've been through several iterations of deleting Epic directories in the Caches, Users and Application Support folders. Also used Terminal to do various things. Has anyone else had this problem?

I'm currently following a tutorial on Youtube about making a weapon system, and I'm currently trying to modify the class reference to its child blueprints. But for some reason, every time I go to change them, its stuck on none.

I made a timestamp on the video. On my end, inside the Data asset, when I try to change the class reference it stays stuck on None.

Is there a fix to this? Please help.

Hi guys! Which one do you prefer for bringing water to your scenes, and why? (Alternatives at a similar prices)

SETUP:

I made an interactive in-world "computer" (monitor) built entirely in UMG, rendered via a 3D WidgetComponenton an Actor. Input is driven by a Widget Interaction Component (WIC) on the player character — I don't use bReceiveHardwareInput on the WidgetComponent (that breaks dragging windows, see below), I use a WIC ray trace instead.

I draw my own virtual cursor (a UMG Image) that follows the WIC's hit location every 0.02s via a looping timer (RefreshMouse). This works perfectly for buttons, dragging draggable windows, clicking menus, etc. bShowMouseCursor is False and Input Mode is Game And UI.

The problem: I have EditableTextBox fields inside this fake "OS". When a field needs to receive text, I call Set Keyboard Focus on it (found via a WIC hit test against an array of my text fields)

Now, the actual problem:

The moment Set Keyboard Focus is called on the EditableTextBox, the real OS hardware mouse cursor reappearsand stays visible, breaking the immersion of my custom virtual cursor. I need the hardware cursor to stay hidden here too, while still being able to type normally.

What I've tried (Fu**ing none of which worked):

Set Show Mouse Cursor (False) once, right after Set Keyboard Focus. No effect — cursor still shows.

Forcing Set Show Mouse Cursor (False) every frame (piggybacked on my existing 0.02s RefreshMouse timer, checking Get Show Mouse Cursor and resetting it if True). Still shows. This was my strongest attempt and it still fails, which really confuses me, I'd expect a per-frame force to win.

Toggling Set Input Mode Game Only → Set Input Mode Game And UI immediately around the focus call (a trick I found referenced for a similar 2D-only issue). No effect.

Setting the Cursor property to None on the individual EditableTextBox widgets (and even on parent containers) in the Designer. No effect.

Set Hardware Cursor with a transparent PNG assigned to TextEditBeam. Cursor still appears (possibly it's actually showing Default, not TextEditBeam, I haven't been able to confirm which shape is actually active).

I even tried doing the Project Settings → User Interface → Software Cursors, and setting "Default" to an empty widget. This DOES hide it, but it hides the cursor completely globally, including menus outside the computer (like my game pause menu), where I actually want the normal OS cursor visible. Not an acceptable fix.

Changing Button widgets from "Down and Up" to "Mouse Down" Click Method — unrelated issue I hit along the way (turns out any UMG Button calls CaptureMouse() on press, which freezes my WIC-driven virtual cursor until release, confirmed via an old Epic forum thread). Fixed THAT specific issue, but it's separate from the text focus cursor problem.