Is there a way to maintain multiple levels active (as in, processing physics and AI only for objects that belong to that level) while keeping them hidden from player?
Attempting to simply hide level does not work since this also stops updates such as physics processing (and when level’s visible, its contents interact with other visible levels anyway). I imagine this would be somewhat possible with level positioning but wouldn’t this cause issues with float precision if level’s too large?
Hey Kadesh,
Level streaming isn’t going to be answer for this. When a level is streamed, it loads all assets in that level and any physics events or AI that activates at load or during play will only remain active while that level is streaming. When level is not streaming, all those assets are unloaded at their current state until level is loaded again. If you need something to remain active after area is exited, you don’t want to unload it via level streaming.
Instead, you could keep assets you want to remain active in Persistent Level and toggle their visibility based on distance from character (or whatever other parameter you want to use). If you have a specific example of what you’re hoping to achieve for which this would not work, please let me know and we’ll see what else we can do.
Hope that helps!
Thank you for your reply.
I’m afraid that keeping assets within Persistent Level and handling their visibility manually wouldn’t fully accomplish what I’m trying to do.
I’m trying to recreate sectors (like those presents in space games such as Freelancer, X3 and Independence War), where player itself is only present in one sector but may have assets (in terms of spaceships) in several sectors, performing a previously assigned task.
This would mean there are multiple zones that do not interact with each other physically in a direct way, with several zones being active only in terms of physics and AI processing, while there’s only a single zone that’s active visually at any instant.
I’m not sure I understand why adjusting visibility wouldn’t work for this idea. If you use a large trigger volume (or any other kind of check, depending on how you’re moving from sector to sector) and toggle visibility of all Actors inside that you want to remain active in terms of physics or AI, you can let them continue their actions when player is not within that volume without letting player see it happening. Can you tell me a circumstance in which that sort of setup wouldn’t work?
That is of course assuming they all exist within same map. If you’re looking to keep physics or AI actions continuing from other maps, you’ll need to look into saving and sharing data between maps, which is outside of what you can currently do within blueprints. In that case they wouldn’t technically continue their physics or AI calculations anyway. You would likely need to dive into code for that sort of solution.
What you really need to do is to implement some kind of simulation for “not visible” sectors. I mean if you wanted multiple levels’ physics and AI to be constantly evaluated while player is “somewhere else” you’d need a super computer to run it smoothly.
Cheers,
–mieszko