Hi guys
I have been working on a pause menu that isn’t the standard couple of buttons on a frozen screen - in fact it’s built in a separate (deliberately very small) level file and I’m going to have a setup whereby I fly the camera between options on it using the level sequencer. Is it possible to link to such a menu and use it as the pause menu, considered it’s in a different level file?
Any help or links to documentation etc on this would be much appreciated
Cheers
Thanks, I’d still like to investigate it though. My levels are quite simple and would not be anywhere near the complexity of those in Splinter Cell. The pause menu level is quite basic too - it must be possible to stream this alongside the level so it can be accessed without the loading times?
try it if you want, but putting your menu in an actor would be more efficient, since levels deal with extra stuff like LODs, World composition location offsets, BSP culling, level blueprints (which provide communication difficulties with other blueprints), and you wouldn’t be able to pause the game if any of your levels weren’t connected to the same world. (like a minigame or house interior, if you load a non streamed level, you couldn’t stream your pause menu.)
ideally, pause menus should stay in memory for the entire game, you really never should unload a pause menu, because they can be accessed from anywhere at any instant. level streaming only works because they hide the load times behind foot travel, but on demand content at the push of a button would not be sped up by streaming, because there is no way to predict when a player might open a menu, so you can’t start loading early.
use an actor. levels are not menus.
Ok thanks, I didn’t realise I could use an actor, quite new to unreal editing to be honest. Would I be able to set up a scene within an actor consisting of static meshes, cameras and widgets, with it’s own blueprint tying it together? As that’s essentially what I have in this separate level
yeah, an actor can contain mesh components, camera components, light components, and an actor can spawn other actors or components at runtime. you could build a whole level out of a single actor, and many procedural games use an actor to spawn instanced static mesh components for walls and floors. but for rendering/draw call efficiency, i recommend combining many of your menu meshes into a single mesh component, sharing the same texture and material, if possible.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll give that a go and report back if I run into any more questions with it all!