Saturday, December 31, 2016

New Mockup Material and Logging Player Location for Heatmaps

So seeing as I was going to be blocking out some very basic shapes over the next few days, I looked for some info on materials for greyboxing. I found this one that has auto-adjusting normals for floors, walls, roofs, etc. It has gridlines that make it easy to see if things are lining up. I adjusted the colors for walls and floors to make it look a bit like Mario.
Found material here:



You can go with a more serious setup though if you prefer, like this light grey for the walls and dark grey for the floors shown below. Next I'd like to look into dynamic textures with text updates based on actual world-size of the BSP brushes/material tiling... 


Or even combine both with material instances! Like I did here:

















HEATMAPS

I was also looking into generating player heatmaps. There are a few 'plugins' I've found online that have all but deprecated with new UE versions. So I started with the built-in analytics plugins and worked on using the updated blueprints to print the player coordinates to the LOG file every second after gameplay begins. 

There is additional functionality for adding various events. Shown here is a "Timestamp" of sorts. Though events could be added into an array and given all sorts of attributes.


Here you see the X, Y, Z world coordinates for the player printed to file.


With the aide of a programmer, we could parse this file, get the coordinates in relation to the actual map layout and superimpose increasing green/red values the longer the player is standing in the 100x100 unit area.

The resulting product might look something like this.

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