[UE5.2] 2D level building, but it's not grid / tile based. Implementation question.

[Roy_Wierer.Seda145]

@MostHost_LA

no one “likes” to use Unreal to make 2D stuff.

I noticed I tried Unity but I’ve spent years in Unreal c++ already. The Unity editor viewport alone felt awful. Probably because I’m not used to it but compared to how quickly I can set up stuff in UE it’s not an option.

@MostHost_LA

has less legal issues with licensing etc

Which are you thinking of here? Is this 2D specific or Unreal specific?

@MostHost_LA

Again, the engine is horrible at nearly everything by now, but it has always been really bad at 2d stuff.
Even a simple game like MarioBros(the first one in 8 bit) is technically impossible when done with the engine particularly if you want to hit the same memory footprint.

I agree. Instead of plugging in what you need this engine throws everything at you of which 90% goes unused in smaller projects. I don’t want to remove the possibility that their might be 3D elements early on though. I might have scenes in which 3D models rendered “pixely” or with certain shaders to look flat are the better / faster option to produce and render on a 2D background. Either this is 2.5D pre rendered sprites (think early mario kart, donkey kong) or just full 3D.

@MostHost_LA

If you really cant look for a better engine, then use the widget system as much as possible rather than mesh planes.
The widget system allows you (at least once it did) to offset the objects with layer sorting options, which the engine is otherwise incapable of doing.
To achieve the same thing with planes you would need to physically offset them on the depth axis, which is nuts.

The gameplay I have so far all plays out on a 2D virtual “plane”. Even if this plane rotates relativeley to the world all relevant gameplay elements play on its X and Y axis, basically attached to its transform. currently the Z axis is indeed used for depth, similar to the Z-Index of widgets. It’s both nuts. In Widgets I don’t use the Z-Index at all because I see it as a bad practice. I use the widget hierarchy to control depth automatically and only set the Z-Index on the first “master” widget I spawn.

I am actually very surprised to hear you say widgets because my experience with their performance has been awful. Most importantly this:

[Bug report] Bad widget performance : Slate : ProcessMouseMove

If you’d use many widgets at once in a game like metal slug, on the bullets for example, it will slow down to a crawl on pointer events and inefficient widget destruction. I can reproduce this by opening and closing an already optimized main menu rapidly (recreating the widget without garbage collecting the other first).

Ahhh… a shame UE doesn’t just work that well…

The tile set for the backdrop might still be an option. I tried it as a tileset and as a sprite (single big image) and funnily it rendered only properly as a sprite.
I just realized maybe there could be some use in the landscape editor, no idea. if I could snap landscape Z to a constant interval and texture the landscape. It’s just one idea of many. That could only be the backdrop.