I’m doing some work on a space game akin to the likes of Starlancer and Freelancer, and I’m just curious about people’s opinions on what would be the best method to implement a feature. The feature I refer to is the ability to “Dock” with space stations. I have all of the blueprint sequences to set an ‘autopilot’ to follow a path of ‘docking lights’ from one end to the other, but at the moment when the ship reaches its destination that’s where I fall short.
In short: I am thinking of setting up each “Base/Space Station” as an individual level. When the player “Docks” with a station, it loads the appropriate level. The level would include the hangar bay/mission room/ship seller/etc all accessible by a user-interface.
I think that your approach is right. When i need to create a separated space isolated from the action scene I prefer a new level.
On the other hand if you need the space dock to be affect by the action in the space (a battle near it) you have to create the dock inside your current level.
You can use the persistent level for youre “space” and then use sub-levels that are streamed in when you dock to the space station. That way you keep the performance up. Read the Epic documentation on level-streaming.
Thanks for the input! I had a quick look at level streaming and it seems to do what I require. Since this is going to be a single-player game to begin with, I guess the simplest thing now would be to disable the controls for the player’s ship while it is ‘docked’ and enable another set of controls for the ‘docked’ interface. I won’t be requiring the game to remember anything specific like AI ship locations when the player docks, so I could likely just destroy all AI ships when the player docks and re-spawn them at their corresponding patrol paths when the player undocks.
If you’ve played Freelancer you’ll hopefully understand what I’m trying to achieve. AI ships spawn on regular predetermined patrols on a loop, so in practice they are expendable when it comes to destroying them at will haha.