Spline Decals?

[Tim Hobson]

[MENTION=29721]PixelPerfectPolygons[/MENTION]

Sorry, I don't think I can be of any direct help. We have a ticket in for it as a feature request and beyond that it's up to the priorities of the Engineers with their planning. Not every feature request will get implemented which is an unfortunate truth.

I've posted this a couple of times before, but Max wrote a really good article for his site titled "Why your idea might not make it into UE4" that gives some insight into why this might be. Everyone always says "oh, Epic can do it really quick and easily!" However, that's really not the case if something needs to be done right and be well tested.

One alternative is to also code the feature yourself (not being you specifically, but anyone with programming experience) and submit it as a pull request through GitHub where it can be reviewed and implemented for everyone if it meets Epic's criteria.

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

I think Battlegrounds probably takes that title now, but I can say as someone who works on Squad, a decal based road system on a spline would be a very welcome addition to ue4 indeed!

See! And these are among the most purchased UE4 games out there. It's strange that instead of doubling down on seeing more projects like these get off the ground, we're being told that we're on our own.

Help us, Tim.

[Drav]

I think Battlegrounds probably takes that title now, but I can say as someone who works on Squad, a decal based road system on a spline would be a very welcome addition to ue4 indeed!

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

You have to keep in mind Tim that open world games like Ark and Squad are among the best selling games using UE4 and such a feature would go a long way in helping development for games like those. We're doing a large open world game as well and the time costs just for getting proper roads in without destroying our world is absurd. I get that it's more interesting to incorporate cool new tech into your engine, but the truth of the matter is that for us down in the trenches making the games themselves, we need this incorporated so we can do our jobs properly. Fix the fundamentals first, I beg you.

[Gunschlinger]

Under what circumstances a backlogged feature request or bug gets back on the to-do list?

What ? How can it be 2017 and we STILL have no decals on spline

[Maximum-Dev]

https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-13142

A ticket has been in for a while. It's backlogged and marked as minor at the moment. This could change in the future, but if the feature is direly important to your project you may want to implement it yourself or hire a programmer to do so. There is also no guarantee that any feature request in our system will be implemented. That's the unfortunate reality of things. :/

Under what circumstances a backlogged feature request or bug gets back on the to-do list?

[jonimake]

It would improve working with landscape quite a bit tbh, shame that's it's not a priority for you :\

[Tim Hobson]

Hey guys. Woud love an update on this. Our game needs good roads.

https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-13142

A ticket has been in for a while. It's backlogged and marked as minor at the moment. This could change in the future, but if the feature is direly important to your project you may want to implement it yourself or hire a programmer to do so. There is also no guarantee that any feature request in our system will be implemented. That's the unfortunate reality of things. :/

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

Hey guys. Woud love an update on this. Our game needs good roads.

[Maximum-Dev]

[MENTION=4894]Tim Hobson[/MENTION], Spline decals are intended to "project" a material on the surface. Without projection it's only like a masked mesh overlayed on other surface with lots of clipping specially on the landscape surface.

[Chosker]

Isn't this something that can already be done with Mesh Decals that was added in 4.11?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]132258[/ATTACH]

This is using just the BP_Spline asset form Content Examples and duplicating the mesh. One is the original base, the second is using DBuffer Decal with a simple brick material with a mask of the UE4 logo. These materials can even work with Landscape Splines.

how would you use that to project into a landscape though? without using a landscape spline to flatten the landscape, that is. just respecting the topology.

also mesh decals cause some bad artifacts at great view distances, since based on distance they push themselves towards the camera to avoid z-fighting. yes I've seen the code, it's MeshDecals.usf line 104 (on UE4 4.15), which is this:

// todo: tweak or expose (cvar or per mesh/material setting), if needed the artist always can create a WorldPositionOffset adjustment in the shader (e.g. -0.1*CameraDirectionVector )
Output.Position.z += 0.0001f * Output.Position.w;

this results in mesh decals ending up wrongly being drawn on top of more and more stuff, the more you zoom out

[Tim Hobson]

Isn't this something that can already be done with Mesh Decals that was added in 4.11?



This is using just the BP_Spline asset form Content Examples and duplicating the mesh. One is the original base, the second is using DBuffer Decal with a simple brick material with a mask of the UE4 logo. These materials can even work with Landscape Splines.

[Chosker]

or there are other factors i.e the requested feature should align with what Epic is working on?

sadly it's been years that their own goals and interests seem to be the main driving factor of their focus, and not so much will to create a good, robust and complete (ie. features A, B and C working together) multi-purpose engine anymore
Usually there's the needs of their main game project (i.e. the numerous improvements and optimizations made as Paragon needed them), some part of "keeping up with the latest and greatest" (i.e. all the focus on VR including the full editor VR mode and forward rendering only justified by VR), and then the more sporadic focus on "some feature to showcase" which happens at specific timelines (i.e. open world features developed for the Kite Demo for GDC 2015, Vulkan for mobile for the Protostar demo running on a samsung phone at the MWC 2016) after which said features seem to go back to a state of minimal maintenance

[Maximum-Dev]

How many people should cast their voice as interested in a feature in order for Epic to implement it? or there are other factors i.e the requested feature should align with what Epic is working on? Because there is an ocean of feature requests that are never answered, regardless of how useful they are and I'm not sure if we should continue expressing the necessity of a requested feature, i.e spline decal.

[Chosker]

It'd be super awesome to get this feature but I know it won't be easy. I know someone that tried to modify the engine for this and well, the problem was non-trivial beyond all expectations