Hey all,
I come here in response to IRC. Indeed I have a large amount of question on external asset loading, and I realy need help on how I can set up all of that stuff for modding purposes.
I saw on Internet some people trying to mount .pak file at runtime from hard disk. This can be interesting in my case however I need some specifications about this.
I’m using UnrealEngine 4.9.1.
My Game is intended to work for Windows x64 x86 and Linux x64 x86. Mac OS is not planned because requires me to spend over 1000€ to buy a computer just for compilation purposes, by the fact I will not be able to work with a Mac (all my home computers/laptops runs under Windows).
Anyways Mac is not the topic here.
I’m posting this in last ressort for a highly easy moddable game. Indeed I’d like to allow people to easly mod the game, create maps/models/texture/sounds/materials all in editor and then export to a file format that my packaged game can load and use. However if the modder needs to download an editor over 5GB just for the purpose of creating custom content where the scripting part will be done much more easy using Lua, I’d like to provide to game users a leightweight UE4 Editor with only map editing, custom content creation (or asset importing), and finaly instead of Play/Compile buttons a button to export data to .Pak or any other formats readable by packaged game. All made in simplicity. No need to use a complicated full Game Development environment which makes over 5GB where there’s only need a few features of it for my Game.
The Game SourceCode part is not realy a problem because it’s public same as assets. All is public in my Github org repo (GitHub - StoneLineDevTeam/UMod: GMod replacement project - Sandbox game based on Unreal Engine), this github repo has been created using built in source control integration of UE4 Editor, most of the C++ codes come from me.
Is there any way to create such leightweight editors as binarries only (no source code) ? And of course is this allowed by EULA ?
So after this first questions, comes the need of mounting those .pak files. I saw this seams a bit complicated to mount successfully a .pak. My first question is at this point realy simple : how can I mount a .pak in a specified directory (ex : “GameDir/Addons/TestAddon/Content.pak”) ?
This said, you’ll ask me maybe what sheme I plan to use, well it’s pretty easy to understand. First of all my game is intended to be in majority multiplayer, and I plan to make server side modding. By “server side modding” I mean server send a list of addons and client will mount paks files from those addons (see previous example for more info, in that case directory would be something like “GameDir/Addons/CurServerAddonNameReceivedByRCP/Content.pak”). Then when the game client will disconnect from the server and return to the MainMenu, the idea would be to unmount the paks files mounted previously on client connect. How can I unmount a .pak file ?
So here is for the .pak management questions.
Of course I’ld like to know, if all of that is possible in the current engine version I’m using. I know you can find me a bit parano with EULA, but I saw many posts with Illegal issues about external asset loading, so again, does what I plan to do violating UE4 EULA ?
Thanks by advance,
Yuri6037