I want to create some procedural generated maps so that I can save time to manual create levels. But that can only work for me if I’m able to save these maps after generation.
How I plan to do that:
Create workflow for procedural generation
Run the game which automatically runs the workflow
Save the procedural generated map as *.umap so I can use it to expand/place stuff on it
The first two points will work for sure but I don’t know if it is possible to save the procedural generated map as *.umap during runtime / or if it is even possible at all with UE4.
If you want to do that in Editor, that’s fine.
That can’t be done in packaged games tho. If you want to do that in shipped games you need a custom map serializer, Unreal has a built-in JSON module that works in runtime modules and you could save any info to Json format and write/read that to/from a text file.
You don’t even need to get that far, if all you want is save some data like which models and their locations, you can just create a custom struct or UObject class and serialize it to disk. Easier to use than dealing with json serialization.