Yup, this is why I decided to just create a portal into the dungeon. Waiting until there’s some reliable way of making a static entryway / exit.
If you wanted to be really sneaky (which I plan to try tomorrow), perhaps a trick with a camera and replacement texture could make a region appear as though it’s connected to a dungeon but really be teleporting the player to some sort of marker.
For NavMesh I changed the engine settings to do runtime navmesh generation and it seems to be working well. I just created a volume large enough to cover a really big dungeon.
My game has topdown view and the player can always see beyond the entrance/exit … it will never look good without real meshes.
And even in FPS view you will have the door behind portal/exit/entrance problem.
The problems with the navmesh can be seen with a static boundsvolume, too. But thats maybe a unrealproblem that could be solved by spawning or moving an actor in the navmesh bounds or transforming the navmeshbounds itself in order to retrigger navmesh creation. Maybe it is a PIE only problem …
I tried snapbuilder again to have more control, but I cannot generate it properly (only one level part is created and the builder stops). And many crashes while destroying the build dungeon …
There should be The Starting Point and Exit Point Node. Preferable. Then when you use several dungeons you could assign the starting point to an existing exit node. The entries can be assigned to a teleport then, unless you intend to arrange the entry to a landscape hole (For straight dungeon types). However, with world composition and dynamic level loading you can also arrange the entry to some rocks and such, but the question is then how you cover up the rest of the dungeon from the view. So i think best place for DA dungeons is to place them below a landscape, or you load them when the player enters the dungeon entrance (which could again have its dedicated DA Node, for a more sophisticated design flow), actually not sure what i will use. With dedicated Entrance/Exit Nodes you can introduce/design more easily level variation, instead of generic placing a door scene and begin using blueprints to make those areas distinct.
It might be enough to add a transform navmesh on EventBeginPlay, by 1 unit? And this might be indeed a PIE only problem, did not encountered this yet with 4.14, but little testing so far.
@Laurentius, I just tested and cannot seem to reproduce it. The actor node spawns correctly on runtime even with actors having their mobility set to Static. Could you try deleting the actor node and recreating it?
You could use a grid builder and populate houses on the sides (outside the dungeon) and use the dungeon path as a walkway. It looks like this in the Unity version. We can have something like this after I add landscape transformation support to unreal. It also modifies the texture / foliage on the landscape
They are all house prefabs so you don’t have to deal with roofs. For entering a house, you could switch to a new level created using the floorplan builder, like in skyrim
Thanks for pointing this out, will try that approach for my villages. Floor plans for such housing is mostly a standard house interior, will post my results , might take a couple of days. Cheers
@TheCouch, Thanks for pointing it out. It’s a bug and it should not be there. I’ll remove the redundant fence separator below the room walls. For your other point, it shouldn’t be a problem as they would not be created anymore
@Laurentius The right way to approach these problems would be to give you all more control of the flow of your dungeons like I mentioned in this post. I’ve already started work on this yesterday and got the flow control editor frame working. It will take a 2-3 weeks to finalize it though. I’ll keep you all posted and give early access to it in the coming days
Regarding the Snap builder, although it is a work in progress, it is unstable and crashes at times because the engine doesn’t like importing actors from another Level map. It also causes issues while cooking, making module level data inaccessible on cooked games. This is not acceptable
So, going forward I’m changing the way a module is saved. Instead of saving your module in a level file, you will now save it as a blueprint. This will remove instabilities and will work in runtime. The downside is, it is not easy to modify your modules inside a blueprint.
Let me know what you think.
(I’ll continue to explore the world composition method which we have right now in another development branch)
@unit23 The intermediate folder is not needed (only used by visual studio, which it creates again if not preset). When I make releases for the plugins, I leave that folder out.
The Binaries folder is where the dlls / libs are for each profile (Development, DevelopmentEditor, DebugGame, Shipping etc).
When you create a shipping build, you shouldn’t need to add any extra files to your build. UnrealEd should embed the DA code in your game exe (since DA shipping build is exported as a static library).
The development DLL is ~2.3MB. Shipping version should be smaller after it is linked
This post looks interesting and could be a very usable approach on giving the whole level a game flow - nice!
I read nothing about visual customization of the “special” rooms, but maybe this can be done also with this new editor - we’ll see
I have a done a working solution inside my game that does just that - modules are designed in a blueprint and then stiched together in the level.
It’s not very easy to design these modules in the standard blueprint editor though … I love the ability to just run the module as a mini level to test how things work out - but that is not doable with blueprints.
The upside is that with blueprints you can have more than one module open at a time - you can’t do this with levels.
For a test I made a new actor blueprint and just print the location return by GetActorLocation in BeginPlay on screen.
I then added the actor blueprint into my theme with a new actor node.
Vector 0,0,0 is always printed on screen … ^^
is how I generate the runtime dungeon - maybe something is wrong or must be updated?
When creating blueprint for marker emitting, i cannot get structures properly from function node. Looks like unreal does not know types for dungeon model etc.
Also following instructions about starter pack for dungeon architect, how to install it, creates some empty blueprints, but that may be result of above bug. I seen some nodes that were disconnected, with majority of graph missing.
Ps.
Is there a way to get my dungeon architect license added to marketplace, when i bought it on your website?
It is not that bug, this is a bit different, even new nodes created in marker emitter blueprint (class from dungeon architect), do not have correct structures exposed. So i cannot use those pins. Many nodes inside imported blueprints are there and would work if overwritten function exposed correct pins. Pins are there but they do not have proper structures behind them.
And overall i love recent improvements to dungeon architect.
