I’m not sure if this is necessarily the correct forum, but at least from my point of view it should be as this seems like primarily a rendering and camera problem.
I’m working on a cooperative game where the players will navigate a procedurally generated (mostly or almost entirely indoor) environment. I want to give the players a navigation map to assist with locating each other throughout the environment, as well as track objectives etc. I’ve seen various write ups on how an easy system would simply place a camera actor in the sky which would capture the play area in real time, and then maybe do something like overlay blips to the HUD representing the locations of the players.
There is a problem with this approach though - what happens when you have to deal with indoor environments, especially multi-story environments such as an office building or the decks of a space ship? Since the goal is to generate environments procedurally, I can’t predict the layout in advance, so I can’t hand-craft a map for the players to use. Today though, browsing Steam, I noticed that Rainbow Six Siege used a system that overcame these challenges as seen here. How can we accomplish something like this with UE4? Additionally, assuming we can get this far, couldn’t we also play other tricks, such as overlaying iconography over the modular pieces of the environment, turning the map into something that resembles a blueprint, with the players represented by blips? Could we even possibly represent the map in one fashion only to reveal it as altered once the “fog of war” clears and a player has scouted the area? I’m wondering if any of you know how they might have accomplished this, or see if we can engineer a similar solution. Another thing to consider is how expensive these types of solutions might be in various circumstances.
I haven’t fully decided on how I want to present the map to players, whether to put it in the corner of the screen, mount it on a Richard Tracy wrist watch (Epic, I understand the need for civility, but there are legitimate uses for the short hand version of “Richard”, especially in the context of iconic characters.), or put it on a laptop screen players can carry around and deploy. Should it simply show the environment as in the linked image, or show an iconographic view of the world. I’d like to understand how a map like this can be made, multiple stories and all, because I know if I can get that far, the details are really just embellishments.