Creating a photo mode

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello fellow UE forum members.

I am conceptualising a new game project that i want to create, it is a skateboarding game something along the lines of a skate 2.

But when i was jotting down my ideas that i had in my head i came to one thing that i honestly did not know how it would be implemented,
what i thought of was a photo mode that you can use to take photos while you are doing a trick down something, over something, you get the idea.

You would have a phone that you could upload these pictures with to a pseudo Instagram app and you would gain followers etc which is part of my main progression within the game,
Well essentially i have two problems:

  1. How would i be able to create a picture type mode within the game, completely separate from the player actor and spawned in near the player but with free movement to get a nice shot,
    I don’t know how it would be implemented but my best guess was to attach another camera to the actor that can be detached when this “picture” mode was activated.

  2. I want the pseudo app to be an actual online platform like the real Instagram where you can find other people, friends etc and connect with them to see their pictures,
    now this i have no clue how it would be implemented, i know it would require networking and having a server setup with a database where all of these pictures could be stored but yeah.

Forgive me if this is not the correct area of the forum for something like this, but it is the only area of the forum that i was questions about cameras etc :slight_smile:

2

Quick bump, want to see if anyone here has any clue about this.

3

you do realize this is a game form. you need to post this in the off topic section.

4

First you’ll want to record the players motion, maybe by recording the controller inputs over time, or the world position and animation frame each frame, so you can replay the scene.

Then you’ll need a camera, and a scenecapture2d node which takes what the camera sees and applies it to a texture, the screen of your camera. Then another camera pointing at the virtual one. Or put the camera view up fullscreen with some hud elements. Either way you capture the scene to a texture.

The oit I don’t know offhand is how to access that pixel data or save the texture to a file, bunt thats the least of your troubles. You now need to transfer it to a server, maybe using the http protocol. For that you’d need c+2 code to open a socket and talk http to the server to put the image. Free libs like “curl” are worth a look since they do all that for you. Post the image to the web server, which then saves it into a database (performs all the authentication etc) and implements a galnery front end.

You probably want to implement the viewer in game too, so you’ll need curl again to fetech data from your server and then create textures and huo elements in ue to make a viewing tool.