Northwood (Unreal Engine 5) by StunningVanilla

The Next-Gen Update is here! #

With upgraded visuals, improved performance, enhanced weather effects, many fixes and much more. 
The demo now supports NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation technology, which will significantly boost performance for owners of NVIDIA RTX 40 series cards! 
It took me a bit longer than expected, but I wanted to refine certain aspects, and along the way, there were quite a few unexpected complications. I’ve worked really hard on this update, and I hope you’ll enjoy it****
Read the full patch notes here.
Watch the summer and winter gameplays using High graphics settings:

The Old West: Northwood is a walking simulator designed to demonstrate the graphic capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 and teach me game development, including creating a functional menu, character with animations, basic mechanics, dynamic world and weather system, special effects, and more. I’m sharing this demo with everyone for free, and I hope someone will have a great time with it.
In this demo, you can control the character of a local sheriff and explore the abandoned town of Northwood. You have the freedom to switch between first-person and third-person perspectives, use a lantern when it gets dark, manually control the weather, or set it to an automatic dynamic weather system. The demo features several simple cutscenes, a fully sound-designed world with music, a menu with various graphic, audio, and gameplay options. Additionally, you can observe the world both during the day and at night when the streetlights come on. You can choose between the summer season and traverse the world on hot days or the winter season with snow-covered roads, buildings, and chilly falling snow.
Here are several details I have implemented:

• Water ripples (character interactions)
• Snow trails with VFX
• Dynamic wind (trees, grass) depending on weather conditions
• Footprints (after contact with snow, puddles, and sand)
• Clothing becomes wet when it rains or comes into contact with water
• Buildings and objects become wet in the rain
• Water dripping from roofs (during and after rain)
• Accumulation of snow and dust on clothing
• Accumulation of snow and dust on buildings
• Footstep VFX varying depending on the surface
• Ragdoll physics when the character falls from a height
• Character idle animations
• Character pulls out a lantern when in water to avoid getting wet
• Flies, bees, and butterflies appear only during summer
• Realistic first-person camera movements
• and more…

I wanted to learn how to create a complete, functional, and complex project, and at that time, Epic Games happened to release a free project called “Old West Learning,” which aimed to provide beginner developers with an opportunity to learn navigation in the Unreal Engine 5 world. That’s why I downloaded that project and started experimenting with it. This demo is the result of those experiments and several months of learning.
🖥️ The system requirements for this demo are estimated as follows:
MinimumRecommended4K Ultra DLSS/FSR @Performance6-core CPU clocked at least 4.2 GHzi7-10700K / Ryzen 3800i9-10900K / Ryzen 3900XRTX 2060 / RX 5600XT | 6GB VRAM & DirectX 12RTX 3070 / RX 6800RTX 3080Ti / RX 6900-XT16GB RAM16GB RAM32GB RAMSSDSSDSSD
I haven’t had the opportunity to test the demo on various configurations, so these requirements are approximate. 
I encourage everyone to give it a try! Let me know what you think, what you liked and didn’t like, and how the demo is running for you. Have fun!