I am not 100% as to how to go about creating this, but I think I will have to incorporate UMG.
I want to have a cellphone the player will have, it won’t be able to make calls (as it has no service) but it receives texts and phone calls. Also they can take photos with the phone.
I need to creat the animations for when the phone is pulled out and put away along with audio clips. This part is easy. The player needs to be able to navigate through the menu to read texts and listen to voice mails and take photos/view photos they took with the phone. I was thinking of having them navigate the menu using the arrow keys. I figured once the phone animation plays and the phone is visible (this is in first person mode by the way) the screen can power on quickly and the player would have access to the menu, when they put it away the screen goes black quickly and the “put away” animation is played to put the phone back.
would this be achieved using UMG and create a simple menu system? As far as the camera, can I attach another camera to that so when it takes a photo, it is from the phone’s perspective?
I also planned to blur the depth of field so everything but the phone is blurry when the phone is out, creating a sense of realism when the player is focused on the phone - but this might make taking a picture hard since they cant see where they are moving around and looking at (still coming up with ideas for this)…
I made almost this exact same system in Unity using NGUI a couple of years ago. Of course, the whole thing went out the window when I updated NGUI to 3.0+ without making a backup… c’est la vie.
What I did was I made the camera swing around to the front of the character when the game was “paused” and I lowered the Time dilaton on everything down to zero , except for the player character, the phone object, and the phone UI (or you can set the game to paused and “Set Tickable When Paused” on these objects). This way the player could see her animation while on the phone - flipping through pages, eye movement, tapping the screen, etc. and I had the screen “projected” to the side of the player character so the player could see it. You could do this right now in UE4.
If you want to have the screen on the actual phone itself, you’ll have to wait a bit for 3D UMG components (widgets that can attach to the world in 3D space) in 4.6.
As for the camera, you pretty much do it as you hypothesised. Attach a camera to the phone’s physical camera location as a component. Then use a render texture on the phone’s screen to show the player what the phone’s camera sees. Then you can save out that render texture to disk when the player takes a shot. Keep in mind: for saving a snapshot you will need to use C++ for now as there is no BP node for saving files to disk.
In my game, it made sense for everything to remain paused while the player character walked around in real-time with the camera, showing both her and the phone on the game’s camera. The character had some time-manipulation powers. You can leave out any sense of pausing or whatever if it doesn’t make sense for you.
Another idea I was toying around with for using the camera was to put the view in first person when the camera mode was activated then save the game camera’s view to file. This is more performant than using a render texture, but in the end I decided it was better to be more immersive than performant, considering the performance hit wasn’t very large.
I plan to start rebuilding this phone system in UE4 once UMG is at the point I need it. If you get there before me, I’d really like to see what you come up with!