Tech – Week Fourteen
The modular building tool works and fundamentally does its job but after being used by Kit to build the demo environment he has come across some things, that doesn’t stop it from working but makes it more difficult to use than maybe it could be. So taking his feedback on board I’ve been looking into changing it to negate these issues.
Because of how it handles the location of meshes in a single array, for each side, when you change the size of the building it can move the placement of pieces.
If you make the building longer then it doesn’t change as you are just adding 2 to the array and not changing the position of the previous meshes, as shown in the image above. But if you make the building taller you shift everything along one and it thus shifts the position of the meshes along by one. This could be stopped by making the order work like this:
But you then get the same issue when making it longer to when you currently make it taller. To overcome this issue we really need a floor based system in which you set how many floors you want and each floor is controlled by an individual array.
After some research I found that 2 dimensional arrays are something that resides within C++ but isn’t currently implemented in blueprint. I have found instances where people have found a work around and managed to create a 2D array using blueprint but unfortunately it is fixed on how big it is meaning I the user wouldn’t be able to change the height of the buildings, which is no good for my purposes.
I’m going to continue looking into a solution but as it’s not actually effecting whether the tool does its job I may have to put it to one side and continue in developing the other tools. My main focus is going to be making the random asset placement tool a lot smarter. I’m hoping to have it so that it places objects closer next to buildings and then have them gradually disperse outwards. Making it more realistic as to how clutter builds up than having it in set areas. Although that version will still be useful for certain circumstances.
