Hello,
For an upcoming project we’ve decided to try using the gameplay cameras system, which so far is proving a wonderful solution, and since for other features we’re making heavy use of Chooser Tables and they’re a familiar interface for our designers, we’ve decided to add a Chooser Table Camera Director (in our case we’re choosing a Camera Rig based on parameters on the possessed pawn).
Before we commit to this system I wanted to ask if you have any opinions about this idea, have you considered Chooser Tables as an option for camera director? Do you forsee any issues with using this as a direction method?
Additionally, I understand that Gameplay Cameras are an experimental feature and therefore subject to significant changes, and we should be prepared to maintain any custom solution we implement on top of it, however do you have any insights you could share about plans for future updates to the Gameplay Cameras that might make this a sub-par solution going forward?
Thank you,
Gualtiero
Hi! Thank you for checking out the Gameplay Cameras plugin!
A Chooser Table is, I think, a perfectly fine solution! What sort of conditions do you intend to implement for it? Or do you intend to actually tie it directly to a Chooser Table on the player pawn’s animation assets?
As for future plans, we intend to always support 3rd party implementations of camera directors and camera nodes -- that’s sort of one of the pillars of the system. There is more work to be done on the camera director API (such as the ability to combine multiple directors dynamically), but overall whatever you implement should mostly keep working fine. For what it’s worth, I have it on my plate to implement a more proper “priority queue” camera director in collaboration with some of our partners. They are selecting cameras based on Gameplay Tags found on the player pawn, evaluated in a certain priority order, so that’s what is most likely coming (but I’ll gladly take more suggestions!)
Ah yeah then it looks very very similar to what I’m going to build… and yes, the partner I’m working with also has a requirement to be able to map a given Gameplay Tag query (such as “Tag1 AND (Tag2 OR Tag3)”, which thankfully is already handled out of the box by the Gameplay Tags system!) to one or more camera rigs, for additive stuff and dynamic combinations. In fact, they even want to be able to specify camera rigs to activate on the base or global stacks too, not just camera rigs for the main blend stack.
FWIW, depending on your timeframe, you may even be able to jump on the very early code for this new director, or at least look at it, when I get around to start working on it (around mid/late July). In order to collaborate with my existing partners, I make sure the “head” version of the GPC plugin (in the main UE5 branch) is backwards compatible to one or two UE versions back. If you check out the code on Github for instance, you’ll see there’s a few `#if` statements sprinkled around, checking for the UE engine version… this may or may not come in handy for you.
Cool!
At the moment our chooser table only evaluetes Gameplay Tag containers on the Pawn/ASC and Mover.
As an example we’ve added volumes for “interior” areas that add a Gameplay Tag, and we have Gameplay Tags that come from our mover component for “Mover.Walking/Mover.Falling”, then we have camera rigs for “walking/sprinting/falling” that are chosen based on the movement modes, and similarly a set or rigs for “Walking_Interior/Falling_Interior” etc.
So sounds very similar to the priority queue director you’re working on, if I understand correctly, so if that’s coming down the line we’d probably look at swapping over (unless our chooser tables setup gets more complex over time).
The only “special” thing we’re doing with the chooser table is returning multiple rigs and activating all of them, so in the above example, instead of a rig for “Walking_Interior” we’d have a “Walking” and an “Interior” rig that both get selected, but the chooser allows the designers to decide if that’s appropriate on a case by case basis.
Anyway, thank you for your insight, and thank you for making this system, I feel more confident in our plans now 