How to handle non-visible "events"?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hi All,

I’d like to have a virtual world where things happen all around, but the player would not directly see them.

For example:

  1. We have a large 3D space with airplanes.
  2. Airplanes fight with each other on their own.
  3. BUT! the player should only see a radar image with a certain radius.
  4. Radar can be moved to “look around” in the space.

What would be the best way to handle these world events?

I was thinking about storing all planes in a database and calculating their position constantly in the background, then handle their fight with some math.
So when the player moves the radar to a certain location, I can always show the up-to-date part of the space.
But this sounds a bit complex, and maybe there’s a better and simpler way.

Would you share your ideas?

Thanks!

2

I would just make empty blueprints with just code. No Mesh or particles just pure empty Pawns. Pawns have the Position and location. Add some ai logic so they fly around avoiding things. chasing each other.

But if it is purely Minimap and it does not have to make to much sense I would try to do something like this.
Coding Adventure: Boids - YouTube.

3

Thanks for the answer.
I also got suggestions to use ECS like https://github.com/skypjack/entt
In the end, I did some prototyping around the idea with all the actors in the scene, hidden behind walls. Occlusion culling does its job well, so maybe I don’t need to optimize for this in the beginning.