With all the things you can do in Unreal Engine 5, this dev's made a load of toilets.
(Image credit: Damp Squid via Reddit)
I think it was a restroom that first made me notice asset duplication in video games. I remember playing the Final Fight arcade game and walking past multiple bust-up toilet stalls with identical damage and graffiti. Today, repetition is still used to save time and memory, particularly in large open-world games. But repeated toilets won't be an issue for one indie dev working in Unreal Engine.
I don't know much about the gameplay or story of Damp Squid's unnamed work-in-progress. But thanks to some procedural magic in Unreal Engine, I know it boasts a quite staggering number of possible toilets. Over 17 quadrillion, of them.
Damp Squid has created an Unreal Engine 5-powered toilet generator to ensure players will never find a duplicated latrine in the game. And work is progressing fast. A few days ago, he reported that he had created a toilet asset that could randomize itself into 1,728 possible combinations. Now he's gone further, adding... contents.
The system generates random combinations using parameters such as visibility, seat position, decal, tint, and, yes, latrine contents for 17.23 quadrillion combinations in total. Each one is the same can, so the colour and general design is the same: the variation comes in their age, how much is left of them, and their contents. The dev says the lid can be 1 of 24 shades of black/grey to show fading over time, or general ware and grime.
"If I put 100 of them in my level, there's a 0.0000000000287% chance two of them will be the same," Damp Squid writes on Reddit. "That's about 100,000 times less likely than winning the Powerball jackpot 10 times in a row. And about 250 billion times less likely than an asteroid impact ending civilization!
"In quantum mechanics, there's a nonzero probability of all the atoms in your body spontaneously shifting to the other side of a wall. The odds of this happening even once in the entire age of the universe are still far greater than my toilets duplicating."
It's impossible not to admire the dedication to the craft. Damp Squid says he's now working on splatter. Nice. "Why stop now, make the turds procedural," one person has suggested on Reddit.
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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
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