Dungeon Architect

[motorsep]

Not really by what I know about the author. Hes just polishing the "terrain architect" at the moment for publish

Are you sure? Usually he is pretty responsive.

[Ali Akbar]

Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of updates these past few weeks. Thank you for the feedback on the snap builder, I'm working on finalizing the next update for DA and I'll keep you all posted

[Ali Akbar]

I am interested in buying this for the City builder. Do you have a demo of how this works for UE4? I seen it for unity on YouTube I would like to be able to create City Scenes for my game. Is this plugin compatible for VR? Looks wonderful.

[MENTION=202843]lafilmcompany[/MENTION] I'll add an example soon

[Ali Akbar]

Ive been testing the 2.5 snap builder. Sadly, its useless for me.

Ill grab the code from 2.4, the one that uses maps, and try to work with it. The reason is simple. Im doingVR, and i need static lighting. With the map snap system, lighting could be baked, and performance can be good. But with this system, lighting cant be baked into the modules, wich makes it useless from a VR perspective. Ue4 does not do any kind of culling on the lights other than simple frustrum cull, and that means that if i look to the center of the map, all the lights in all the modules will be calculating, completely destroying performance. If those lights cast shadows, the murdering of performance will be a serious thing, making any kind of half-big dungeon unplayable. Without the shadow casting, then light bleeds beetween modules.

Its nice how fast it runs now, and how it doesnt crash every time you exit play in editor, but i have no other chance, becouse the older version was WAY more performant. It also could use the navmesh from each of the modules, avoiding a global rebuild of the navmesh.

This is a video of the prototype im doing. This would be completely unplayable on the new version, as each module would need to be a blueprint and i cant bake light or navmesh.

Good that we have the source code, becouse i needed to edit it anyway to create my own tightly controlled dungeon. Such a shame you had to change it to use blueprints, what made the snap builder so strong is that it could use levels.


There is also a bit of feedback i have:

There is no way whatsoever to control the layout of the dungeon. You only have main path, branch end, main path end, and main path start. Its common to see 2-3 modules repeating in a row (easily seen in the video, there are 8 different modules). There is also no way to tell it to not repeat the branch end modules. Something i wanted to do is to have 3 different branch end modules, and use each of them in 3 different branches. But there is a chance that it will repeat 1 module in all 3 branches. That layout editor you were working on for other types of dungeons would be good for this.

Another thing that would be great is a "forbid" filter on the doors, so you can tell it to forbid putting a "hallway" room after another "hallway" room.

[MENTION=154]vblanco[/MENTION] While exploring different alternatives, I've looked at the lightmass code of UE4 if we can bake in lightmaps within a blueprint. It doesn't seem straightforward. The primary reason for switching to blueprints (from map files and world composition) was a single module (level) cannot be streamed in multiple times at different locations. It can be done during runtime with a hack, but not during design time. For this reason, I was creating multiple copies of the level file in your content browser and adding them to world composition (which was crashing the source control due to multiple large binary map files everytime you build)

There are other alternatives which [MENTION=1680]motorsep[/MENTION] and others have suggested that will help and I'll explore them further (Cull Distance Volume, Precomputed Visibility Volume)

[Ali Akbar]

Great plugin, how can I group placed blueprints connected by the ground node? I want to place a trigger blueprint in the same location as another BP spawned on the ground.

[MENTION=16963]owenprescott[/MENTION] Have a look at the Marker Emitter Node section in the User Guide.



In the above example, curtains are attached to the desired wall mesh (with the window) only when that mesh spawned. The curtains would be spawned relative to the parent mesh (the wall with the window). This is similar to your example where you'd spawn your trigger from the desired BP node. You'll need to create a marker with some name, attach your trigger to it and emit the marker from the blueprint node

[Ali Akbar]

Ali, thank you so much for the improvements to SnapBuilder, I hope you can manage to alleviate the issues some people are having with their lighting.

I have a request!

When you first started SnapBuilder, we were limited to only one copy of a map being present in a level at a time.

Now that you're using blueprints for the room modules, I was wondering if you could add that functionality back in as a toggle on specific blueprints.

My projects require that certain rooms only show up once in a world.

If this function is already present then please ignore me.

[MENTION=18451]RedSaturnSix[/MENTION] I'll look into this

[Ali Akbar]

where is the code for 'GetFurtherestRoom' ?

[MENTION=23423]drarem[/MENTION] It's been moved to the Query System. You can find the examples in the quick start guide (Query System Examples section)

[Ali Akbar]

@Ali Akbar I read awhile back that you might add more functionalities to the paint/edit the dungeon after procedural generation. Have you seen this painting/building workflow on D.R.O.N.E? The three things that I like from it are:

1) Ability to quickly block out a play area using a painting style.
2) A symmetry option to create PvP maps.
3) A prefab option to save and load a chunk of the map.

Maybe you can add 1 of those functionality when you work on the paint/manual edit of dungeon architect .

[MENTION=47360]kelfire[/MENTION] Looks very intuitive! The paint tool is very limited right now and I'll be improving it in the near future. Thanks for sharing

[Ali Akbar]

[MENTION=28980]Ali Akbar[/MENTION], I think I found a bug with setting collision options for dungeon parts, say I want my walls to ignore the camera channel, I set it up in the theme, set up a custom collision for the wall in the collision section of the static mesh node and set it to ignore for the camera, but when I rebuilt the dungeon the collision flags for my walls have the default settings.

[MENTION=463716]Ratamorph[/MENTION] I'll have a look

[Ali Akbar]

Hi Ali, I'm just learning DA for my new project and so far is very good, thanks for the awesome plugin.

I have two questions:

first, how can i remove the walls between two rooms? i mean the walls that usually are next to a door, like this (without using a override volume, i want to do it procedural) its posible? :

[ATTACH=CONFIG]128635[/ATTACH]

Thanks.

[MENTION=659147]Khamul[/MENTION] It should be possible in the next update. I'll add an API in the query interface to query the adjacent cells of a wall so you can check this from the selector logic and remove it

[Ali Akbar]

[MENTION=154]vblanco[/MENTION] While exploring different alternatives, I've looked at the lightmass code of UE4 if we can bake in lightmaps within a blueprint. It doesn't seem straightforward. The primary reason for switching to blueprints (from map files and world composition) was a single module (level) cannot be streamed in multiple times at different locations. It can be done during runtime with a hack, but not during design time. For this reason, I was creating multiple copies of the level file in your content browser and adding them to world composition (which was crashing the source control due to multiple large binary map files everytime you build)

There are other alternatives which [MENTION=1680]motorsep[/MENTION] and others have suggested that will help and I'll explore them further (Cull Distance Volume, Precomputed Visibility Volume)

Another option would be to use portals for doors / windows

[Ali Akbar]

Early progress on the dungeon flow editor

[RedSaturnSix]

Awesome! Thanks Ali!

Do you know if the room blueprints support landscape as a component? I'm trying to generate random island groups.

[skeleton60]

Cant wait to have more info and video and tutorial about Dungeon flow editor !

[motorsep]

Alright, finally I got some time to make a mock-up of what I am after.

Basically the legend is a following:

Blue - blueprint rooms that are made manually (semi-modular or completely custom, still made on the grid) and placed manually.
Yellow - blueprint rooms that are generated by DA (location determined by DA or area boundary within which such room can be generated is marked by the desginer)
Red - connecting hallways with rooms (or not) generated by DA from modular pieces
Green - either manually made or generated by DA rooms that are only reachable through teleportation (if it's 100% pre-made, placed by the designer; if not, location determined by DA or area boundary within which such room can be generated is marked by the desginer)

Outdoors surface is manually made. It doesn't have to be on the grid, but the point where generated dungeon connects to the surface would be on the grid.

It's a 3D dungeon with pre-made rooms that connects to the custom made surface outdoor area.

Pre-made rooms are manually placed by the designer. Generated rooms (yellow) are generated and placed by DA, or designer can mark boundaries (with a volume?) where DA can generate it and place it. After all rooms are in place, DA would connect them and then connect the dungeon to the outdoors (entry points would be also marked by the designer manually; also can make several entry points and DA can connect them as random)


Full image: https://s27.postimg.org/gi2m8apmp/procedural1_top.png


Full image:https://s12.postimg.org/g3079w4gb/pr...al1_3_D_01.png


Full image: https://s8.postimg.org/sif03l30z/procedural1_3_D_02.png


Full image: https://s32.postimg.org/utcj21537/pr...al1_3_D_03.png

And the finally dungeon would connect to the outdoors surface:


Full image: https://s8.postimg.org/kewm3sdpv/procedural1_3_D_04.png


Full image: https://s16.postimg.org/6zkzqdp6r/pr...al1_3_D_05.png

Is it achievable with DA (I assume Snap builder should be capable of doing this) already ?