DinoCam - Mesh Component Update Flag / Stasis / Scene Capture 2D

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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Hi,

In my current project I’m trying to add a camera to my raptors (yes - like in Jurassic World)

The issues I’m facing are however quite performance related. First, if I remember correctly, it’s possible to create render targets dynamically in C++ assets, but not in blueprints…
As a result I’ve had to pre-define/hard-code a set of render targets. I can live with that for now, as I’ve simply implemented a set of render targets as broadcasting frequencies, however, it would be nice if creation of dynamic render targets were exposed to blueprints!

Currently the biggest issues are with dinos going into stasis and their skeletal meshes not updating when not rendered.

#Stasis issue: For the stasis issue, I’ve made childs of all dinos and ticked ‘Prevent Stasis’… What I really wanted was that all tamed dinos would be kept out of stasis, affecting all nearby wild dinos to stay out of stasis too…

  • Have I missed something, or is that currently not possible?

#Skeletal mesh issue: So, bones of skeletal meshes aren’t updated while their skeletal mesh aren’t rendered…
For me a Scene Capture 2D ‘camera’ is just as much rendering as the player camera is, however, that’s not the case!

  • Are there any tricks I can use, so that I don’t have to set the ‘Mesh Component Update Flag’ to ‘Always Tick Pose and Refresh Bones’?

For the perfect stackable mod I would like to change as little as possible, and instead make a new saddle with a camera as attachment.

Currently my mod “overrides” all the dinos and even the male, female and base player! The players are fixable by adding an item to the inventory or by making a weapon/tool…
But fixing the dinos without modifying them seems impossible? Is that really true?

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That feeling when you google for Scene Capture 2D and Stasis issues just to find your own, almost a year old, question that never got a single response :frowning:

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Your approach is wrong. It would not be good for all of the dino’s to not go into stasis when the map section they are on is unloaded it would increase the load substantially if they all continued to move around, not to mention getting stuck inside static objects that are also unloaded at the same time.

You need to attach a separate actor to the Dino which you can set to not go into stasis which would allow you to keep track of the dino. You would then be able to run tests to determine if the dino is in stasis or active on a client. If active attach a camera and have fun, if not send info to the viewer that the dino can’t be viewed at this time.

The other issue you’ll have is accomplishing this on dino spawn, I’m not sure there’s a good way from a mod perspective for doing this. It becomes simple once a player has caused the dino to load, but until then I’m not sure how you would do that short of modifying all the dino bp’s which isn’t a good way to go imo.