Is this project even possible?

Hi all,

My work has tasked me with building a program to show the efficiency of our packing crew (fun I know) which I designed in JS and JQ on a HTML page and was told it looks too totalitarian and there was no pause function for the function i was using! Fair enough.

The idea is that I need a HUD that allows user input of how many batches to do a day, which is translated into batches per hour based on time left in the day (till 1700 say). A timer starts and ticks down to 00:00 at which point the target batch number turns to 1 and the timer restarts. There is a secondary functionality that each batch consists of 70 boxes, which ticks from 0 to 70 in time correlating to the batch time (stay with me!).

Hopefully that makes sense. My idea for visual representation was to have a box on the left of the screen and a box on the right. The left slowly fills up with spawned boxes in the time it takes for a batch to be made. (so 1:00:00 to make a batch, 70 boxes falling of the course of that hour into the box) on the right is the target batch, and on the press of a button (space) all the boxes will fall into the box and they get a score of 1.

There must be pause start functionality for the timer, and possible a menu of sorts. Further down the line I want to add an efficiency score and a table at the end of the day to see how they stacked up against the timer. This last bit will be added after, I think i have enough on my plate.

I have some knowledge of the EU4 engine but it’s not all that, i’ve only created a few levels to jump around, followed the Epic tuts online and learnt enough for me to put something simple together.

So, is this possible? Any ideas for a direction/workflow/suggested tutorials.

Thanks for reading,

Very possible but unreal seems way more complicated than you need! If you are adamant about using it then look into UMG and blueprint programming, however my gut says there are tech solutions out there that will better match your requirements - UI oriented, less power / cpu, faster compile times, more understandable to people brought into the project, etc.

Depending on your platform requirements I’d be thinking html5, Java, c#, Qt (not all at the same time - pick one!).

Unreal is a modern game engine designed to throw millions of particles on screen, animate complicated characters, display complex shaders with shadows, displacement, reflections. This power comes with baggage :slight_smile:

I was getting the overkill feeling with UE4, I picked it because of the visual feedback aspect but the visualisation of the road ahead became somewhat misty when I booted the engine up and stared at the screen for a bit!
I’ll check out your suggestions, do my research and see what I can learn, thanks

Good luck!

If you accept my response above it closes the topic and makes me look good :slight_smile: