Feasibility/Difficulty Check – Scoreboard/Camera on Object in game?

[Gorebringer]

I am working on an arena map and would love to have the scoreboard in game and/or spectator cams grabbing bits of the action. Or maybe just a leader board somewhere. I have seen this in another map but it was an old UT1 map and I am not sure how this was done. I am just trying to see if this is even something I should attempt. I have made a half a dozen maps with the previous versions of UT and do have a decent understanding of level design. Is this something that can be linked and set up in Kismet? Is this a bunch of pure code work? What about a big screen with a spectator cam or two in the level showing what it sees? (I think this probably too much but it doesn’t hurt to ask does it?) More questions to come if this is something I think I can tackle. I love challenges…

Thanks!
Gorebringer

[mustapha]

I don't know about the leaderboard... I assume you can find something in Kismet to do that.

As far as the ingame/spectator cam... it's not that hard to use SceneCapture actors and RenderToTexture actors to do this.

Hourences has a tutorial on this at his site:
http://www.hourences.com/book/tutori...eflections.htm

[Gorebringer]

Great thanks! This gives me a good starting point to see how this is going to work. Any other tips or tricks about this are appreciated!

[Solace]

I'd just go easy on it, things like that tend to do horrible things to FPS, especially online...

[Gorebringer]

I agree the map I am working may be laggy to begin with so this would kill it. I see some testing in my future... I think it may work if it is a highly localized view it shows or maybe a better solution would be a slide show type idea that shows "highlights" but it would probably need to be pre-generated screens for that. This is much more for color and atmosphere then any real game play feature. I am just trying to get a feel like the megatron or something from the super bowl.

I am pretty sure a scoreboard/leader board would not be as resource intensive but I do not even know where to start to do something like that. I forget the map name but it was in the first UT and it was the tops of three sky scrapers. There were some marquee boards that would read “Gorebringer leads by 7 kills…” and things like that.

[Waylon]

A scoreboard would be totally doable with a combination of kismet and material instances. The scoreboard would have a separate material for each letter on its display. The material would be a texture with numbers in a strip [0123456789]. And you'd control the UV offset of the material instance via kismet so that it displays the right character based on the score.

That could work for player names too probably, but it would be a lot more nasty work.

CTF-Strident has some kismet that's based off of who's winning (robot girls start dancing), so that might be a good starting point for that half of the work. Also look at the material instance nodes in that scene, I'm not sure what they do, but it might help.

[Gorebringer]

Does anyone know if there is a way to grab the F1 scoreboard and use it? This would be ideal to just project this on a scoreboard but not even sure where to start looking. I need to dig through Kismet to see what there is in there but the scoreboard exists so I shouldn't have to recreate it, just use it somehow. Thanks!

[Gorebringer]

OK I have the big screens in and they seem to work well. Low res but seen from a distance through a little fog/smoke they look great. They are really for color anyway as you do not have time to sit around and watch the action on the megatron...

Onto the next part, the scoreboard. Now in the UT_UI package there is the scoreboard in there. What I would like to do is output that to a RenderToTexture. Is that possible? It seemed like a whole package and am unsure if it as a whole has a unique name or not. I may be able to attach that to the camera but not sure how to go about doing that. If someone can help with some ideas that would be grand. I know it is possible to do it through moving and rearranging a ton of smaller textures through Kismet for the desired affect but that is simply too much work for this starter map. If I can just get the F1 scoreboard to output to texture I would be golden...

Any and all help is appreciated!

Thanks!

[Gorebringer]

More snooping and guessing...

OK I have been messing around with the UI creation stuff some and it refers to the scoreboard as a scene. Now there are a couple actors that render scene to texture. Is there a way to grab the scoreboard scene? I know how and have implemented in game camera's that grab some action. I have been using the 2DRenderToTexture actor for this but there are a few others. Can anyone point me to something that might explain this stuff a bit more in depth? What each one does and what it should be used for?

Thanks again... I really want to get this to work...

[SEBASTIEN-NOVA]

I have searched too how to make a texture who display the scoreboard for few weeks, and i'm shure it's totally doable.

I'm shure the best way is to follow the method used in UT2004.

What wee need in UT3?

-a ScriptedTexture to display a text on a surface (it seems the 2DRenderToTexture UT3 actor has the same fonction as the ut2k4 ScriptedTexture)
(I have grab some info here : http://utforums.epicgames.com/showth...ipted+textures)

-a MessageTextureClient actor who allow the mapper to edit the text he want show ingame, the font use and the texture use to display the text (maybe just use the script of this UT2k4 actor and import/modify it to UT3, or maybe the fonctions of this actor can be created with the Kismet...)

That would probably only what we need to do...

To sumarize, the only thing we mess, it's a MessageTextureClient look's like actor.
But I have not enough knowledge to code it or simulate it with Kismet