here is, what I think might be a cool feature for UE4:
In Unity, there is the concept of prefabs. You can drop any game Object and hirachy of GameObjects into your Scene and create a Prefab from it, that you can then spawn in your scripts. In UE4, you can do similar stuff with Blueprints, but it is way more complicated.
In a project that I am currently working on, I want to procedurally generate dungeons, using some static meshes to build rooms and then arranging those rooms procedurally. You can add static mesh components to blueprints, and arrange them like you could in the scene, but only in the BP editor itself. This way, it is hard to see how changes you make in your blueprint,affect the layout of your scene, if it is composed of multiple blueprints.
It would be cool, if you could just reposition your static meshes, that are part of a BP, inside your actual Scene. Also it would be great if you could drop some static meshes into your scene, select them all and create a BP using those meshes.
The good news is that you can already do one of those - there is a feature to create a blueprint from a selection of actors in the world. Just select multiple objects and click “Convert to Class Blueprint.” It’s hidden away all the way at the bottom of the details panel:
I just tried it a moment ago and discovered we’ve got a small bug with this at the moment. When you first convert, it’ll look like all of your static meshes have disappeared. This is because the root of the created blueprint is set to be “Movable,” but the static mesh components themselves are “Static,” and you can’t have movable components with static children. So by changing the mobility of the root to be static (or the mobility of each child component to be movable), everything will show up as expected. Sorry about that, we’ll certainly try to fix it soon :). For clarity, here’s where you change the mobility for a component in the Blueprint Components Editor:
Note that once you convert the selection to a blueprint, you’ll have to go into the Blueprint Components Editor to move the components around. This is of course where your second suggestion would be nice to have. The best I can do on that one is tell you that we agree - component selection/manipulation in the world is something we often think about and discuss here.
this allready seems to be helpfull, to at least get the first design right. Even though, being only able to tweak stuff inside the BP editor isn’t optimal, but should work out.
What would also be great, if you could somehow bake navigation information into your blueprint, so you could use UE4s Navmesh system with procedural generated content, that you generate using class blueprints.
To my understanding it is both. The votes are a pointer towards epic, so that they can see what the community desires and considers those wishes into their release plans.
It would generally be great to see more tools in UE4 that are catered towards procedural generation of content, like integration of Noise generation like perlin or fractal noise.
A lot of indie games generate their content procedurally so this could really help to make it more feasible towards indie devs.
