Mineable Rocks #
This is our quick walkthrough of the Mineable Rocks
Core Principles of the Mineable Rocks #
I have included two types of rocks. You choose which one you prefer.
- Staged rocks based on a static mesh. The only thing you must do is select your mesh in the configurable and it will work! It has fewer visual effects but is predictable and stable.
- Chaos-based rocks. Looks amazing! But needs some work to configure. Less predictable and stable.
Both rocks derive from the same parent class. This class is responsible for respawning the rock when that is enabled. This is done because trees (my other asset) require the same logic. That is why I have created one parent.
For performance reasons I’ve created a supermaster class. The only thing that this class does is spawn the actual staged or chaos-based rock when it is hit by equipment that meets the requirements. This is done because in this way the logic of the rock doesn’t exist in all the rocks in your world when not needed.
Material based #
Damaging the rock goes as follows:
First, the source is checked. In this case it means that our source must be equipment and the accepted equipment type to inflict damage should be true. After that you are eligible to apply damage.
The durability is changed based on the damage that the equipment does to the rock.
After doing damage we check if we’ve applied enough damage to go on to the next stage.
If we’ve destroyed the last stage, we’re spawning the ores that are selected inside the actor.
Chaos #
The logic for checking the equipment is the same as in the material-based rock. However, the handling of the damage is different. When you hit a rock, we’re spawning a Chaos WeaponImpact blueprint. This is a sphere that will destroy the required segment for chaos rocks.
When the rock breaks we make sure that we destroy all of the components for chaos rocks.
Actor Foliage vs PCG #
- You can use the actor foliage to spawn it in the world via the foliage tool or use a procedural foliage volume.
- However, since PCG is out and stable we strongly advise to use PCG. E.g. Our advanced Biome generator in combination with the mesh to actor swap system! Perfect for large scale worlds.
use cases #
Add a new staged rock #
The material offset based rocks are static mesh only. To create a new rock, follow this instruction:
- Make a child of the master or copy paste a configuration:
- Select your static mesh in the class defaults:
- Now you are done, and it will work! Tweak settings in the class defaults to your liking
Add a new chaos based rock #
Setting up the chaos rocks is more advanced. Please only do if you know what you are doing!
- Make a child of the configuration from the master or duplicate an existing one.
- Setup the class defaults and manually override the geometry collection (of course you need to make the collection first, check for chaos tutorials.)
- After you have setup all the defaults properly, test it out!
My chaos rock breaks to fast or to slow, what to do? #
- Chaos is heavily under development at Epic. On each update I see massive updates which also affects my assets. I’ve seen a couple of times that the mass calculation is changed which can cause issues of breaking down too fast or too slow. Gladly I made an option to easily change this.
- I just copied the same guide as for the trees since this part is the same.
- Open up the master blueprint and navigate to the settings and set the “Print Mass” to true.
- Open the child config of the rock you are hitting and notice the” mass required to be chopped down”
- Hit the destructible object and check the mass that is printed. In this example, we see big numbers over the 4000 while we only needed 450 mass for the complete object to be destructed.
- This means that when all pieces are broken, we have ~4000 massed chopped away. We probably want that somewhere over 50% of the total mass. We are going to experiment by trial and error to see what mass works for us.
- Change the mass until you are satisfied with the result. Use the printed mass chopped down as an indicator of where to start with the mass.
- Second part to consider is tweaking the amount of damage. I have the following formula:
- You can change the force multiplier and tweak it so it does not break all at once or not at all. It is very sensitive. This is also a trial-and-error process.