I want to show my Grid Manager PlugIn for Landscapes with Pathfinding in UE4 and UE5. Use large landscape with your default editing, material overlay for grids as hex and squares, team colors and borders. FogOfWar as post process material. Very high performance with texture buffers and runtime virtual texture. Update anything in realtime.
Everything works inside the Editor right now. You can create a Grid Actor and choose your landscape you want to use. The Grid will be generated automatically. It is easy to adjust your own landscape material, simple create a material function and plug it in to the grid material.
You can add a grid component to any actor and adjust the behaviour in the editor. There is a grid manager mode where you can move any actor around and snap and align it to the landscape grid.
How do you like that so far and do you have any features that should be implemented for your needs?
Here are some insides and updates on moving across any landscape.
The problem:
Even in grids, units move along the surface and do not jump from tile to tile. So usually you would line-trace on every movement for each unit to calculate the orientation.
a) Tracing is slow
b) The trace can miss between landscape components which leads to errors
c) No smooth transition between the orientation along a path
This is how the orientation looks like with tracing the landscape. The normal map demonstrates the face orientation.
The solution:
Grid Manager has the option to create a normal map without using any sort of tracing. It calcualtes the normals directly from the height values of your landscape. A resolution of 1024x1024 can be generated in 0.5 seconds.
This alone will result in the same “facetted” normal map but can work as a solid cache (problem a) without any trace misses (problem b).
We can adjust the smoothness of the orientation by two options. We can interpolate the normal map just like a bi-linear filter of a texture does at rendering pixels. By this we can use a facetted map but transition at the edges will be automatically smoother (problem c).
We can even blur the normal map so the raw data will already been smoother then the facetted normals of the landscape.
The result will have a nice and smooth transition along the path:
The normals are smoothed and reading values from the map are sampled.
Using a smoothed normalmap with sampled normal values will allow to have ultra fast unit movement onto the surface of your landscape with automatically adjustment to smoothen the orientation while moving along a path.
The generated normal map of the landscape is cached in an data asset for fastest loading.
Easy component switch on the grid for Hex or Squared Tiles. Everything works exactly the same for actors and pathfinding. Only need to adjust your setup which you like the most.
