Actually, I wanted to use the spreadsheet for easy maintenance, having all 144 stones altogether. I don’t know what would be a better approach to tell the system that there is four times the Dot1 stone but having in mind that these are not instances but four individual ones. And in the next step, what I had in mind was placing these on another database driven layout.
I found one video a couple of weeks ago where somebody is programming a simple mahjong game - exactly in the direction I was looking for:
There, a simple txt is being used as a layout file to define where the stones are being placed and how many go on top of each other. Just the last stone needs to be added manually on top of the four stones in the middle and two stones left and right.
with that in mind, I think it’s pretty easy to build up own layouts outside of UE4 by using a simple text file. But I was not able to find a way to tell UE4 to eat something like this and interpret this into actors inside a scene environment plus placing the 144 stones from the database into this layout.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvqYl_w8Vk
](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvqYl_w8Vk)