Unreal Engine City Building Game - The Grid - EP 5

In this video I make a grid system in our world that will be used for snapping objects, roads and buildings to each other!
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - Creating the Grid Manager
09:00 - Creating a Grid Cell
11:30 - Snap Buildings to Grid
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[@BOTS31]

For people wanting to have the grid in a specific area what you need to do is: Get the "Default Scene Root" World location of the gridmanager and "add/+" it to the output of the "make vector" (at 8: 48) and at the outcome of the add\+ into the "Make Transform" This way you will have the grid lay-out and it will spawn at the world location of where you put the BP

[@xaxao649]

Could you elaborate a little more? I tried working on this by myself before seeing this comment and couldn't get it. Still can't get it haha 😅

[@oliverholmberg1462]

Thank you!!! This is the only good tutorial i've seen of grid based building systems. You literally saved my game!

[@xdahid22]

Great tutorial, thank you very much!

[@hansknut2284]

Again Awesome Video!

[@raditsyz]

Thanks for the vid! This one was a breeze.

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

Glad it helped!

[@GaryParkin]

Thank you very much. Still hanging in there.

[@CrimsonWoods]

You can pull off a 2d array by utilizing the map container type instead of an array and use a 2d vector as the key. Maps are just like arrays but let you choose a specific type to key what you store. both the keys and values you store can be pulled as arrays aswell.

[@alexanderwagner8199]

Thnx a million!!

[@joeanrachelmiller6529]

The grid i have from UE 5.1 seems to be 800. Already having the flexibility is giving me other ideas. Thanks man

[@rifz42]

Cool Channel! it's great to see some unique ideas for tutorials. How would you save all the blocks that are placed in game? thanks

[@Neekhaulas]

Thanks for the video! When you talk about snapping, you talk about the easy and hard way, what's the hard way you're talking about?

[@VetskuGaming]

I dont understand how you only have 171 subscribers. Well lets up that to 172!

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

Thank you so much for the support!

[@user-ld4jc9je3o]

I can't wrap my head around why you would loop through all grid cells in the world per frame just to find the closest grid location. Just divide the X and Y by the grid width, round to nearest int, multiply by grid width and add grid width/2 to it. If the grid system becomes more complicated than this later, we should check if there exist a grid cell on the location, and if not, search around the location to get the nearest, or just refuse to display.

[@Crackasa19]

You can use FMath::GridSnap in c++ or BP node. See my last comment

[@user-ld4jc9je3o]

@@Crackasa19 yes but it’s easy math, so doing our own math helps when we want to customize it in any way

[@Crackasa19]

Ouh okey, I understand what you are telling me

[@tbunreall]

Can you expand on this? I don't quite understand :/

[@devuegames]

incredibly grateful to you for the lesson 💖💖💖💖💖 I have found another lesson for you, and if I combine them, I will apply the mechanics I need, like Fieldrunners 2. When you drag the tower into place, you will have a green grid where you can place the tower. I hope Google translated correctly)

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

I'm really glad it helped you! Thanks so much for the support :)

[@paradox8425]

​@@thegamedevchannel3063 Can you give us some clue about hard and more optimized way?

[@sonny5974]

Is this possible to do on a sphere instead of a plane? great tutorial thanks

[@joshua7baker]

Heya, awesome tutorials! Great for reference :) I have a question about using the grid not at runtime, where would you start with placing buildings on a grid when not at runtime, for instance creating a level and having buildings / zones allocatted before runtime? Thank you for the invaluable tutorials!

[@MadMax-mw3og]

Mate your gonna go big, keep this up, each video I watch I feel more like im watching entertainment than learning, but its both

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

Thanks so much for the support! And your email, I'll get back to you shortly

[@murnoth]

Great video, thanks for the ideas! I think I'm gonna try and store my actors in a Map with vectors as the Keys. As long as I have my cursor hit event locations ran through a subtract the modulo, it should be able to look up everything quickly while saving on storage space on a huge grid

[@Hydra_360]

quick question how do i add an input action that will adjust the height above the ground

[@GEARINSADE]

If someone is having trouble getting distance between two vectors: use the vector subtraction node connected to a vector length node.

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

There's also a vector distance function you can plug two vectors into I believe, thanks for the tip!

[@Hydra_360]

@@thegamedevchannel3063 there is only a distance to point segment node

[@TheAbbadon178]

First of all great Tutorials ! I have been following up until the Citizen Tutorial. I was wondering how I can increase the performance on the Grid. When cranking up the Size of the Grid to a 100 it starts to perform really bad when placing buildings and rotating the Camera. You got any Solution for this ?

[@prototy]

A few optimizations I implemented was to not spawn actors to store the grid info and instead make a structure with all the info I need for each grid. Then I used the modulo (or modulus, always get those mixed up) of the x and y of the world location under the mouse to get a unique vector 2D for each grid that I can use as a key in a map with the structure I mentioned being the data in the map. At 100x100 I am getting 90 fps :)

[@MuriloFernandoFloriani]

I'm 100% sure I know you man! ;)

[@BrianDeric]

Maybe you should use hierarquica instances instead of spheres.

[@gamerdweebentertainment1616]

Works, kinda... maths off a bit or I missed something, 1st cell is at 550;550 -.-'

[@thelandsavior402]

Great video, i would like to makea game and i hope you can teach me everything along the way~ (like Hay Day or Japan Life)

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

I hope so too!

[@thelandsavior402]

@@thegamedevchannel3063 Don't discourage me, ur my everything! Gambateh!

[@danielacosta6084]

Is it possible to apply this to the building pieces in the previous video? I want the pieces to be able to snap onto eachother. I want to make a modular building system, and if I can apply this system to the building pieces, that would be exactly what I need. Thanks in advance!

[@danielacosta6084]

Ah nevermind, I spent all day working around this and somehow I managed to pull through. Only issue is that since its run every second I have some very taxing commands and my game does not run too well lol. Also the circles used are messing up the overlap so its considering itself invalid... I'll probably find some way to fix it...

[@Hydra_360]

In the Future Can you make it so that you can change the grid snap

[@mahmoudhhammdybakheet2411]

Is this system goog for match 3 game

[@powerpc6037]

Isn't it easier to calculate the closest vector by looking at the coordinates and with the worldgridzsize and gridsize, calculate in which gridposition your mouse is, instead of looping through the array every frame and calculate distances for every single gridposition?

[@xmlstudios]

what I did was to use line traces to detect cell meshes that I made invisible and its pretty good

[@xaxao649]

Im confused on the definition of GridSize and WorldGridSize Is GridSize the size of a single grid cell? or is the the WorldGridSize? Or is GridSize the number of individual cell(s)? From what I understand from poking around is WorldGridSize=Size of a single cell, GridSize=Number of cell

[@adam4designss]

Still only 3 spot highlight the forth one doesn't appear ,follow your stepts

[@give_me_aspirin]

Hey would you be able to tell me how you can place a block on top of a block? Like as in green box on top of green box? that would really help me out

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

You could probably keep track of how many blocks are already in each grid cell (0,1 ect) and then when trying to place a new one if you want them to stack add (height of one block * number of blocks already in the cell) to the position of your new one?

[@gladiusstudios01]

Hi I was wondering I’m planning to do this video tutorial is there a way you can do a building system that isn’t grid based like more free form building but still don’t clash when building on top of each other

[@elizabethlaplume2267]

Have you found any good resources or do you have any advice for doing a freeform building system? I really don't want to be confined to a grid but still want to have roads connecting buildings

[@gladiusstudios01]

@@elizabethlaplume2267 no I haven’t sorry

[@ZenoFar853]

U didn't add save load system

[@KieDK]

For whatever reason this grid system quit running smoothly and started lagging hard. I even went to back ups of my project that I knew ran smoothly and they were also lagging.

[@supermariogolden6444]

There’s only one layer of the grid cell it doesn’t cover the entire thing

[@fabriziogiorgi8405]

How is this sooo expensive I don't understand , my framerate gets half when I use a 15x15 grid size

[@danielmarco4818]

It's the For Each loop. As he said, it is expensive.

[@xmlstudios]

expensive to set up but nothing to run

[@gadji2011]

Спасибо тебе. У тебе приятный голос! Покажи пожалуйста как можно сделать сетку как в цивилизация 5/6?

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

Hi, thanks for the support! (I'm sorry I don't read Russian so I had to translate what you said through Google). Hopefully it translated correctly! What I would do is a very similar system but offset each row by half of the previous row if that makes sense? I'll try and represent that by the numbers table below if you imagine they are the X values of the Grid Cell 0 2 4 6 8 10 1 3 5 7 9 0 2 4 6 8 10 1 3 5 7 9 0 2 4 6 8 10 And then obviously for the North/South neighbours you should an extra for the two attached cells. hopefully that helps!

[@MohamedSamy-vp2pq]

I hope if u can road spline curves

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

I'm hoping to get to that in the future, however I think that will be the "advanced" implementation. The plan is to have a sim running on a simple grid system and then expand the features to include curved roads, changeable terrain and other cool stuff :)

[@MohamedSamy-vp2pq]

@@thegamedevchannel3063 I hope if u can do it this things for beginner's is really impossible, thank u for awesome series

[@kiwivideobeast8602]

Can u pls tell Ur pc specs and i subcribe and like ur video

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

Hi, thanks for the support! Right now I'm in desperate need of upgrading haha. I'm still on an i5 and a 1060 Graphics card, 32 GB RAM

[@kiwivideobeast8602]

@@thegamedevchannel3063 thanks

[@Nio0B]

I'm a bit confused if i start to make a 100*100 grid i can't believe spawning 10 000 actors is the solution.

[@jared875]

Give the guy a break. He's said before that he's still new to all of this; At least when this series was current

[@Nio0B]

@@jared875 well my comment was not offensive and i never saw a programmer who ask for a break after a comment on algorithm optimisation.

[@teratocarcinoma3142]

i need this on unity and in spanish :c

[@thegamedevchannel3063]

Sorry about that! The logic should be transferable but the syntax won't be :(