Advanced customization/setup for players creating their own maps

Good day UE4 fans, especially the Dev-Team itself on this wonderful Saturday (i apologize)

At the moment, i am in the creation of game assets that can be used by the community to build their own in-game maps.

Within i got stuck on some questions during my R&D and it seems Epic / this forum here seems to be the only place left to ask.

We already released a bunch of FBX white-boxes the players can use to create their own maps. This is the current workflow:

  • white-box FBX / uasset pieces the people can use in their regular downloaded UE4 editor from Epic
  • giving us their finished white-box umap
  • we’re reviewing and cleaning the map, replacing whitebox-assets with game-assets, lightbuild, adding power-ups and functions etc. > release

This way is both, time consuming and probably not manageable in the future by number (we already got ~6 new community maps last week).

For this reason, i am building a level-design tool in form of an advanced system using blueprint assets to speed-up the process.
Within i got stuck into several questions i need to get covered before i can continue.

The workflow + questions:

  • Creating Blueprints for all level assets.
    Example: Tunnel section with replaceable meshes and textures per drop-down menu,
    people are able to choose “by given design” how their tunnel will look, coloring, etc + telling which power-up should show up there.
  1. First question: Is it possible to lock the blueprints and game assets with a password so people can use the BP.uasset and mesh.uassets in their editor but
    can’t look into it / export it to FBX? (For several design reasons, prevent touching the BP code, exposing / touch FBX, etc).
    This really is an urgent request and i didn’t find any documentation about yet.
    Just being able to place a tunnelBP into the UE4 editor, selecting their style per dropdown in the details panel - nothing more or less, not exposing any code or export.

  2. Second question: Can i setup some “hooks” inside the BP, accessed by the details menu to set objects, managed by the game - not visible in the current BP
    For example: Use this particular “hook A” for being a player starting point or some particle fx.

  3. Third question: During the creation of this custom BP holding a mesh inside, i want to place several normal and color decal materials on this one + exposing the decals material to people who place the BP. They must be able to change decal colors and maybe textures through a drop-down in the details panel.
    Somehow, i don’t find the option to add decals into a Blueprint - detailing the object inside. Is this even possible and if not…is there an alternative i can use?

Special Saturday questions (Some are already answered on the forums but maybe there are some updated important information from the Dev-Team):

A) Loading custom maps into runtime. Once players can use private servers, they should be able to load their own maps - sharing them with friends to play together.
Like seen in many other games, just placing new downloaded maps into a maps folder. If another player does not own this map - it gets downloaded from the private/hosted server.
(I remember that games similar to Arma or Counterstrike provided this functions, not sure - long time ago) What are the needs for it?
Just loading new map from a folder should be fine, visible on an in-game UMG level drop-down list

B) What are your experiences on this topic? Is UE4 capable of providing functions to actually build community driven games we just saw in the good old UT99 times? (The 90’s…imagine this)

Thank you for your patience and i hope this thread here is not TLDR.
I know, i asked a lot of questions.

Best,
Tobias

It is an interesting idea to automate the WhiteBox to Finished Level.
I have been playing around with combining lots of objects to make
rooms and other large areas and then using that to make quick maps and
getting some nice results.
So maybe you can make it work.

I don’t work at Epic but I think I can answer your questions.

As far as I know there is no way to encrypt your Blueprints and then have them work in the editor.
If you want them to behave different than they already do you need to modify the engine.
And this can cause a whole host of other problems if not done right.
But do you really need to lock it up. I buy a lot of assets
I always need to tweak all kinds of things in my projects.
I would not want to buy any assets that are locked where I couldn’t see what is inside and modify the BluePrint and the meshes.
or anything that had to modify the core engine to work.

  1. You don’t need hooks to get things in the BP details menu.
    This can be accomplished by creating a reusable component.
    For example take a look at the FirstPersonCharacterBP that comes in the first person template
    Click on his character movement component, and a bunch of options will come up.
    Try it, I think this what you want.
    If you create your own component the same thing will happen.

  2. For the decals. Just add them to the BP with that big green +Add Component button
    if you don’t want them to show up set them to hidden in game.
    You can unhide them and assign whatever material you like at runtime or construction

about your networking questions I don’t know.

Hello Colorado, good to see that i’m not alone on this topic.

@1: At the moment, it seems not possible to build an in-engine editor which is capable of saving maps.
I trust our community so normally i don’t make a big deal out of it. If somebody does look into the BP behind the level editor “yet” since its probably an easy one.

We’re not selling these assets, they’re a give-away alongside the game they bought to open a port for them to build first custom maps that stay true to Descent Undergrounds design-docs.
Personally i don’t see a problem to play inside a Walmart or Kids room map (Hell yeah!) - But for the beginning i want to prevent problems.
If people start to alter either BP or FBX “because they can” then it might cause problems like assets are not working in the way they should
…in worst case some “that 0.01% Florida Man” implants naughty code - and things get messy for all.

@2: Oh, i will take a look! Thank you!

@3: Somehow, i totally missed it. Thanks again. :slight_smile: