This is one I sort of wish for as I’m working more on level design; there’s frequently a lot of trial and error in constructing areas because it’s difficult to gauge, visually, the relationship between player movement and the environment.
It would be nice if there was a blueprint-callable function that would leave a marker at a specified location in PIE until told to clear, even AFTER exiting PIE and returning to the editor. That way I could, say, place a marker every tick while sprinting and jumping off a ledge and get a clear visual indication of exactly how high and how far a player is able to get by doing this, to place powerups, ledges, etc. Or configure a keypress to place a marker at the actor’s current location so I can make an exact note of where the player comes into sight of a camera so that cover can be placed, or just generally whatever.
It is possible to do build this using blueprints. I constructed something similar on a previous project i was working on. I had a visual representation between the marker locations and the character as well which would then change color according to the distance. I basically spawned a marker, added it to an array and drew debug lines on every tick to the player.
You can also then call the values you require like distance, speed etc and save those so if you close your game those values can be looked at later.
Another note is the potential to use print string nodes and print them to a txt file, just remember to append additional information to the string so you can make sense of the data.
How did you do this? I know how to set up all sorts of indicators, both in editor (via construction scripts) and in-game (using blueprint graphs)… but I don’t know of a way to access data generated during PIE in subsequent editor sessions after PIE has exited.
Well my use case was not exactly how you describe what you want.
What i understand from what you request is that you want the ability to spawn actors at runtime, and then they are not destroyed after closing the game session and actually becomes part of the level.
What i did was when spawning an actor, get the information i require, for example the location and write it to a vector array. And then save that information.
So when i close the game session the variable is still saved and the information is accessible for me to read. I then copy and pasted the information into actors to create manual representations.
I manually construct a sort of transparent block of various sizes. One for walking, running etc and move that around my level to gauge distances that would be reachable.
This is also pretty cumbersome truth be told.
Your request would actually come in pretty handy if spawned actors remain in the level after closing pie
I don’t even want to spawn ACTORS as such, I just need flags (like the trace debug lines, for instance). I just need a way to note locations in a way that subsequent edits reveals, so I can track things like the exact arc of a player’s jump for placing powerups.
With a disclaimer that I haven’t used it myself, I think the Visual Logger may do a lot of what you are looking for. You can use nodes to emit locations, boxes, or text, and then scrub back thru a recording to see where and when they were emitted. From the 4.7 release notes:
Log out events, then use powerful tools to search on a timeline. This video shows an example.
• Items on the timeline with warnings are now shown in yellow, and items with errors in red.
• You can use a special Debug Camera to fly around while the game is paused.
• Save out generated ‘reports’ from visual logger events. Hyperlinks in the reports allow you to filter the log, making it easier to analyze
