Train, Rail and Roller Coaster System

Community Marketplace
22

The tracks and splines are all in engine / editor so you can drag / copy them out using standard grid snapping or any snapping plugin you might have installed. There’s nothing in the system that would limit placement.
You can also make child blueprints from the track class and store them as pre-built track sections for placement or spawning at runtime.

Yep, 100%, the system comes with some pre-built triggers, one of which is a junction trigger. You can see an example of the junction trigger in action at 12:35 in the video at the top of the thread.
All triggers are easy to use and extend. So yes, you can build a fully working train network with this system.

Hope that answers both your questions, if not, or if you have any follow up questions, let us know.

Thanks,

23

Hey got two more questions -

  1. How much do you anticipate this system to cost?
  2. Does this support trains that raise and lower on a rail? Example
24

  1. $30 - It’s a big system and took a lot of work to get to this stage, but we wanted to price to be accessible to everyone.

  2. 100% You can move / delete / spawn / rotate / scale or anything else you can think of.
    All you need to do is call the function via Blueprint to make / update the connection points when it’s done moving / spawned and everything will work as normal.

Shout if you’ve got any more, we’re more than happy to answer any questions, it’s really great to see this kind of interest in the system.

Thanks,

25

Many features, good work. We will certainly see it in Marketplace very soon. Good Look!

What about a 360 degree loop, like a roller coaster?
I would like to see trains and characters running upside-down.

I had seen something similar in 2015 when posted a thread about his Procedural Motion Toolkit or Spline Driven World Actors, another very good work using splines tracks with several other different features.

26

Is it possible to set up or change roads in the game?

Like Minecraft

27

Yep, that’s no problem at all, here are two screens and you can see examples of loops and upside down tracks in the video as well.

We haven’t played enough Minecraft to have experienced roads in the game, we checked out some YouTube videos, so please forgive us if this doesn’t answer your question.
You could change the track model to be a road and change the train model to be a car if you want to. Obviously in this setup building roads with a train system would result in a very simple road setup, but it is possible.

Thanks,

28

hey
just to double check, are you saying that it is also possible to modify tracks in realtime :slight_smile:

29

Yep, 100%

In the editor you can edit the tracks in real time and the mesh and connections are updated with every change (you can also disable this via the build options section).

At run time you can spawn the tracks and update the splines as you need to via blueprint.
Here’s a screen shot of us from 5 min ago to prove it, we span the track actor as normal during run time and the with a key press we loop through every track in the world and add 100 on the Z axis to each spline point, call the update track function and boom, real time and run time track modifications.

http://polygonjelly.com/products/unreal/trainandrail/screenshots/forum/thumbs/realtime_runtime.png

Hope that, shout if you have any more questions.

Thanks,

30

Let’s say that there are one Player Character or/and AI Character occupying one railroad car and this car stands upside-down. This means that this characters, cars including camera can also stay upside-down as well?

31

No, it’s not a gravity system nor does it modify physics in any special way.
Physics are applied as normal, you can stand inside the carriage and move with it. If you go around a loop or over a steep hill then the character will react as your setup dictates. If the tracks change and they suddenly go upside down, then the character will fall out as you’d expect them to.

Hope that clears things up.

32

This looks awesome! I have no need for this in any of my current game projects, but I want to pick it up just to play with it haha! Nice work.

33

This is exactly what I wanted and it has even more features than just that. Can’t wait for it to be available!

34

Does it support magnetic levitation tracks too ? It is current tech that does exist. Is it possible to have your system replicate that and then just add custom tracks and train meshes ? I would need that for sci-fi levels and I would like to be able to have control over levitation parameters like having the train levitate a lot higher on the tracks compared to current tech for example.
And could it be possible to have “ghost tracks” for the railroad? I mean to design and assemble tracks that then remain hidden so that the train meshes run on a railroad that is just not there but still following it properly? So like having trains floating in air too like there was a track there but only in-editor such track would be viewable/editable.

35

In the Unreal live stream they mentioned you want ideas. After noticing in the marketplace I immediatly thought I need to setup a rail turret system so maybe some thought into a basic projectile example would be interesting. There was a similar type of turret created for one of the Unreal Tournament games.

36

my next question is “when is this coming”?

37

Thanks DasMatze, when we first wanted to add a train to our prototype, we thought we’d have it in and running in a couple of days… Nope. After some searching and research we came across your topic and a few others of people all looking for the same thing.
So we decided to build a solution. We did some physics prototypes, which were interesting, but didn’t really work out, and there’s no way people would use them. We might put together a blog post or postmortem on everything we went through, I’m sure someone will get something out of it.
But topics like yours were invaluable when starting this project, so we hope you enjoy the end project and that you get what you need from it for your project. When you’ve had a chance to try it out, please send us your feedback, or if you need something more from it, shout.

Yes, 100%, trains come with a mountain of options to adjust the look and feel (check the doc link for full list), including offsets on the track, so you can have it float above the track to create a mag rail effect.
You could even take it one step further and change the speed calculation function in blueprint so that as the speed reaches 0 or the power to the track is decreased the offset is decreased and the train lowers down, if you want to create a fancy effect.
See the screenshot below for a screen of the sample maps showing the offsets in the carriage setup example map that’s included.
http://polygonjelly.com/products/unreal/trainandrail/screenshots/forum/thumbs/carriage_setup.png

Yes, please see the previous posts for answers on replication.
Yes, the meshes provided are for example only, you can change the meshes to anything you want, all are exposed via blueprint to make things easy.

Yes, the tracks are built on splines, so you can disable the track mesh and any other visual option you want and the train will still follow the track and work as expected.

The whole thing has been built so you can change it to anything you want; mag rails, ordinary trains, roller coasters, convener belts, anything that moves along a track, you should be able to build with this.

Indeed we are, so thanks for taking the time to make a suggestion. Are you suggesting that the turret is mounted on rail so it can move around?

We are just waiting to hear back from Epic about the release date, as soon as we have that, we’ll update here and on social media.

Thanks for all the questions, it really is excellent to see people this engaged, please keep the questions, comments and suggestions coming.

Thanks,

38

Something like this could be very interesting.

To feel a little more inspired
Painkiller Hell & Damnation Level 11 Loony Park
[video]]

39

Quick update; The system has been approved and we are waiting for a release date. Big thanks to Epic and the marketplace team for helping us get it setup.
We’ll update this thread and the OP once we have a release date.

40

Can the cars simulate roller coaster physics?

41

Could you elaborate on your question?