Mini Assets - Proximity Culling & Interactable Lighting Tool

Inspiration

Taking inspiration from traditional offline game engine functions & UMG Narrative Horror experiences to allow for easy lighting effects setups and simple culling/disabling of geometric entities.

What it does

It's two simple world tools to automatically optimise and visually de-clutter your levels globally during play by making objects invisible/Disabled at customisable distances using Gameplay Tags. And setup interactive narrative lighting setups in a few clicks!

Allows for an infinite number of objects to be culled by distance through gameplay tags and dynamic lighting, with flicker and short-circuit effects as well as switching setups via usable trigger and proximity trigger.

The optimiser includes Safety Features to allow for multiple optimiser instances to be ran simultaneously with overlapping Tag names, by always using the optimiser with the lowest (most optimal) distance number!

It also takes into account each player, so assets will never be disabled if any player could possibly see or interact with a cullable entity based on your custom set distance!

How we built it

Created using a fairly Simple Typescript setup and Horizons AI Assistant

Challenges we ran into

Usage of overlapping timers often caused trouble with lights & traditional entities not being culled at the same time!

Getting several functions for light intensities & general activations to function and not interfere with default values, and talk to each other, while allowing for different switches to activate the same lights at the same time was the biggest hurdle!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a fairly easy-to-use setup where you can realistically just copy and paste each light and it will already be connected to all switches and effects functions which you can turn on and off at the click of button!