I am currently working on a human rights project where we are using Unreal to perform a “situated testimony”: an interview involving unreal on a monitor with live editing and recreation of the interviewees experience of an event. The process is working very well, the interviewee tends to be more comfortable and uplifted by the 3d interactivity and graphics allowing them to be more open when talking and can also jog their memory where they may otherwise just be tired or confused.
Our setup involves a save game where the play mode involves a first person character (and option to switch to third person) that can place objects switch on lights and fire pits and other things, which are saved so when we go to editor everything is still there when we go back.
The problem is, sometimes we wish to change landscape, foliage or place more buildings and objects in editor. Ideally we would design an entire editor in play mode, but we haven’t had time. So I was wondering about the feasibility of unreal having a persistent save game option between the editor mode and the play mode, I understand this may cause issues but could it be possible? For example I could place a car in editor go into play mode, and the interviewee may say, “that car was actually a van, oh and this road goes uphill more”. It can be difficult to change both those things before he moves on to talk about something else. But if I could change the car in game, exit into editor mode to change landscape and everything would be persistent it would be ideal. Either that or an in-game map editor plugin would be great.
What do people think of this?