A few weeks ago, I came across an article on Gamasutra about the various types of UI systems used in video games. I was never particularly interested in UI design, but this article piqued my interest in the subject. So I started reading up more on the subject matter and played through a few games like Dead Space and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, both of which were lauded for their innovations in the UI design space. Even with the games being almost a decade old at this point, the UI systems employed by these games are starkly different when compared to most of their contemporaries.
Anyways, playing through Splinter Cell: Conviction got me really interested in the concept of Spatial UI design. Basically, this form of design represents UI elements that are displayed within the game world but are not actually a part of the world/setting. After doing some research on various types of systems that come under this category, I decided to recreate some of these UI components in Unreal Engine. To that end, I started work on a couple of projects, the first one being the Waypoint Generator. Now, I had previously developed a couple of functional waypoint generation systems as part of my Tower Defense toolkits. So instead of starting the project from scratch, I just migrated the required blueprints over to a new project and started working from there.
The basic underlying logic revolves around the use of nav mesh to obtain path points from the player character towards the active objective. The path thus obtained is then divided up into smaller segments before adding them to a spline component. The generation of these additional path points serves the purpose of removing weird twisting spline artifacts that occur around sharp corners when dealing with a very limited set of spline points. With that potential problem taken care of, all that's left is to lay down instanced static meshes to display waypoints along the path.
Moving on to design structure of the implementation, it's using a child actor component to attach the waypoint generator to the player. Within the construction script of the generator there's also an option to try out the system in the editor for debugging purposes as shown below:
The system, however, does have a limitation when it comes to displaying waypoints along certain types of inclined surfaces. Basically, from what I've heard, the navigation system in Unreal Engine tries to reduce redundancy as much as possible while generating path points. This can sometimes lead to a situation where a line drawn from one path point to the next ends up passing under the surface or quite a bit above it when dealing with stairs and other steeply inclined surfaces. Splitting up the path into smaller segments as I've mentioned earlier will not help in this scenario because it doesn't really take the navigational paths into account. It's basically just dividing a line without any other concern. But in any case, I've added a system that can mitigate this issue to some extent by using line traces to check the ground location at all points before placing down the waypoint meshes. It may not be able to correct the rotational data between path points in certain scenarios, but it always makes sure that the meshes are placed just above the ground location. If anyone knows of a better way to get around this issue using blueprints, I would really like to hear about it. So feel free to share it in the comments section.
Anyways, playing through Splinter Cell: Conviction got me really interested in the concept of Spatial UI design. Basically, this form of design represents UI elements that are displayed within the game world but are not actually a part of the world/setting. After doing some research on various types of systems that come under this category, I decided to recreate some of these UI components in Unreal Engine. To that end, I started work on a couple of projects, the first one being the Waypoint Generator. Now, I had previously developed a couple of functional waypoint generation systems as part of my Tower Defense toolkits. So instead of starting the project from scratch, I just migrated the required blueprints over to a new project and started working from there.
The basic underlying logic revolves around the use of nav mesh to obtain path points from the player character towards the active objective. The path thus obtained is then divided up into smaller segments before adding them to a spline component. The generation of these additional path points serves the purpose of removing weird twisting spline artifacts that occur around sharp corners when dealing with a very limited set of spline points. With that potential problem taken care of, all that's left is to lay down instanced static meshes to display waypoints along the path.
Moving on to design structure of the implementation, it's using a child actor component to attach the waypoint generator to the player. Within the construction script of the generator there's also an option to try out the system in the editor for debugging purposes as shown below:
The system, however, does have a limitation when it comes to displaying waypoints along certain types of inclined surfaces. Basically, from what I've heard, the navigation system in Unreal Engine tries to reduce redundancy as much as possible while generating path points. This can sometimes lead to a situation where a line drawn from one path point to the next ends up passing under the surface or quite a bit above it when dealing with stairs and other steeply inclined surfaces. Splitting up the path into smaller segments as I've mentioned earlier will not help in this scenario because it doesn't really take the navigational paths into account. It's basically just dividing a line without any other concern. But in any case, I've added a system that can mitigate this issue to some extent by using line traces to check the ground location at all points before placing down the waypoint meshes. It may not be able to correct the rotational data between path points in certain scenarios, but it always makes sure that the meshes are placed just above the ground location. If anyone knows of a better way to get around this issue using blueprints, I would really like to hear about it. So feel free to share it in the comments section.
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