Scaffold Level Editor
a year ago
- #Game Development
- #Level Design
- #Unreal Engine
- The developer is creating a specialized level editing tool called Scaffold inside Unreal Engine to enhance productivity, individuality, and performance.
- Scaffold focuses on power-user hotkeys, hackability, and efficient data structures inspired by 90s game engines.
- Convex decomposition is a key concept, where complex scenes are broken into convex volumes for efficient spatial algorithms like raytracing and pathfinding.
- Modern game engines like Unreal and Unity use dynamic spatial partitions (e.g., Octrees) at runtime, which can be resource-intensive.
- Inspiration comes from 90s games like DOOM (Binary Space Partitioning) and Descent (convex-by-construction level design).
- Scaffold integrates with Unreal's editor, offering tools for vertices, edges, faces, and 'cubs' (convex segments), with operations like extrude and bridge.
- Scaffold's raytracing is 100x faster than Unreal's built-in collision, useful for specialized tasks like bullet-hell patterns.
- Scaffold also generates navigation graphs for AI pathfinding, working for both ground and aerial units.
- Future plans include exterior hull tools for open environments and refining the toolset with more smart operations.