Bug: Points shift between planning and non-planning mode

[bloop]

I just like to say, this is the most accurate reflection of land navigation I've experienced. The thing that stands out the most from other titles is the effect terrain has on your movement. Thick vegetation slows you down significantly and there is lateral drift to your movement like in real life.

I did however find a slight bug with plotting points. If I pull up the map while in-game: the points I plotted in planning mode are offset a little to the southeast, in slightly different spots.

[Aljav]

Thanks! Glad you are getting good use from the game!

The problem with perspective skewing is because the planning view uses an orthographic camera, which removes all perspective, but when not in planning mode, the camera has a perspective of 90 degrees, which is closer to the human eye.

Because the map dots are slightly above the map (about 1/10th of a cm), when you look at them from an angle with the perspective camera, they can appear slightly askew. If you are making precision measurements, its best to do so in planning view, though you should try to route plan with tolerance for 100 meters of inaccuracy as laser-like accuracy usually is not practical to expect for any movements greater than 500m.

In updates to the game I've simplified the camera and the problems of perspective skewing are not noticeable, but I do not have a time frame for when this will be released yet.

[bloop]

That sounds like a tough problem to solve. If I'm understanding correctly, you're rendering the perspective-corrected map points separately from the map itself. Perhaps you could go another route and instead of treating the points as separate objects you could draw them directly to the map object's material/texture. That would save you an extra draw call and eliminate the need to do any perspective correcting for the points.

I'm not too familiar with how much control Unreal gives you over Materials during runtime but I've used features in other engine/frameworks that let you create dynamic textures that can be drawn/streamed to at runtime. It may be possible that you can take the 2D coordinate data of the points in orthographic mode and draw them to U,V coordinates of the map texture in perspective-mode.

As a disclaimer: I'm saying this as someone who has absolutely no experience with Unreal Engine

[Aljav]

I have fixed the issue since this version, I just dont have the newer version ready to upload yet. Well, to be technically correct, there still is some perspective skewing but I've made it almost neglible while only using a single camera.

Drawing to the material would have been the best thing, but it was a lot more complicated so i went with a simpler approach. When I made the game I was learning the ABC's of coding and unreal engine at the same time so I did a simple thing of just physically attaching a little dot at the click point, and to avoid zfighting it had to be a tiny bit above the map.

The fix was pretty simple - rather than dot being a plane I make it a sphere with volume, so it can physically touch the click point without having any zfighting issues.

[bloop]

Whatever's simplest work best. This is really good for just learning coding