Still working on the level setpiece. Very close to being finished now. ETA on the demo is a few days, hopefully.
Had an embarrassing problem arise. I've been working on this project for a few months now and it wasn't until today that I noticed every single one of my normals were flipped. Never thought to question why some stuff looked janky, I guess. Easy fix, however, since Unreal has an option to flip the green channel within the texture instance and I could do it in bulk. Had a happy surprise when suddenly the game looked way better than before.
Another conundrum I had to deal with today was in regards to memory management. In order to have modularity in the props and NPC customization, I have a multitude of arrays which contain static and skeletal meshes. All these were implemented as "hard" references, meaning every instance within the array gets written into memory together with the actor. In the case of NPCs this amounts to roughly 60 skeletal meshes, written into memory all at once. I spent the evening replacing all of these hard references with soft references, which basically gives me manual control over what gets written into memory and when; culling any superfluous data. After the implementation was finished, a run-of-the-mill NPC would only write 6 skeletal meshes into memory now.
This change carried over enormous optimization benefits unto the demo map as well, shaving about a gig and a half to two gigs of unnecessary memory off, which I'm very happy with.
I have a miniscule amount of setdressing left to do before I will initiate the lighting bake and begin to finalize the demo.