Released a new blueprint framework that recreates the Last Known Position mechanic from Splinter Cell: Conviction. If anyone’s interested, feel free to grab the project from Github at: https://github.com/RohitKotiveetil/U…nVisualization.
Preview Video:
The Ghost material used for visualization was created using Tom Looman’s custom depth solution mentioned here (under the ‘Culling Inner Triangles’ section): http://www.tomlooman.com/the-many-us…h-in-unreal-4/. So many thanks to him for sharing that. This tutorial was also really helpful in setting up the material: Setting up a ghost material in UE4 (university blog) - YouTube
As for the core gameplay mechanic, I had initially planned to use skeletal mesh components using animation pose snapshots of the player character’s mesh. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the Poseable Mesh component, which made the implementation a cakewalk thanks to its inbuilt function that lets you copy poses from skeletal mesh components without having to use an animation blueprint.
Known Limitations: This system does not work out of the box when there are multiple AI units that can detect the player. It does have an AI Manager that is responsible for activating the visualization. Support for multiple AI guards can be easily added by having the AI Manager check for valid targets among all the guards, every time it receives a message that a unit has lost track of its target.
