Hi,
currently I am a little bit lost about how to get ANY structure into my scene content. A few years ago, when I was looking into UE3 out of curiosity I noticed the same mess in demo scenes…
Now when I open the First person Shooter demo all I get is a MASSIVE list of scene content. Why isn’t there any grouping going on and how can I get tree structured grouping here?
What I want is to put all map content into one tree node (I don’t want to know about it for now). And then focus on the dynamic parts like spawn points and player. But at the moment I simply drown in this huge list I can’t get my hands on.
In Unity 3D I can just drag and drop anything into empty gameobejcts to organize things… Any ideas how to do that here or is there an equivalent? Having 10000000 assets on the root level can’t really be the next gen approach I figured so I clearly have missed something here.
There is a folder structure system in place in the outliner, or upcoming in one of the next few updates if it is not yet in the current build. However as noted in UE3 also, UE traditionally has always placed much less emphasis on manually organizing the scene, and more on other systems. For example you would use level streaming to separate the gameplay layer from the geometry layer for example. That way multiple people can work on the level at the same time, which wouldn’t be possible if you’d just organize within a single level file.
You can also freely rename any object, for ease of finding it back again later, plus there are dozens and dozens of Show/Hide functions that allow you to hide specific parts of the scene at will. You also got a selection set system (called layers but it is more a selection set than actual layers). And you got the property matrix which allows you to sort the scene based on any property you want, and you got the level and texture statistics windows which allow you to sort the scene content based on performance related values.All of those plus the future addition of folders in the outliner should give you more than enough power to keep an overview on the scene.
Thanks for the info. Yes I know about all the filter functionalities (at least I have heard of them ;)). But still the way my mind is used to organizing things is simply a graph structure, not a planar list in which I can hide/search for objects.
For instance, I may wanna have a node called “Room A”, “Room B”, “Monster A”, etc… each fo those folders contains all stuff in the scene that belongs to that particular “mental” group. Of course youc an emulate that with filters too, since a folder technically is nothing more than a filter on the file path (lol)… But still its the thing about folder structures that you start with a root, where you have really big chunks of stuff grouped and hidden, and then can work your way into the details by going through the tree structure. For me, this is still the best way for organizing things (besides a mind-map which is kinda hard to realize at this point). Put filters & stuff on top of that and you get awesomeness…
No it doesn’t seem to be in the public build yet (I checked it out yesterday).
Also, kinda related… I was thinking about how to get this huge demo map into my own project. Would it be reasonable to put it all into a blueprint and then export/import that blueprint?
Right now its still unclear to me how to share assets between projects. In Unity you could create an “Unitypackage” from a selection and it would (hopefully) find all the dependencies and wrap it into a special package that could be imported or published standalone.
Just copy paste the whole content folder from the other project into your own project, in Windows. Or parts of the folder. You can freely move files around between projects, as long as all files they reference are taken along as well and the folder locations are the same.
There is also a migrate option in the content browser but I believe this will not work for an entire level.
Putting into a BP would be a really bad idea.