Rooms. You need them. I got 'em.

This last week I powered through trying to finish making rooms in the way I wanted. Randomize certain elements so I didn't have to spend time designing each room and encounter.

Short story :

I failed to achieve this, so I've settled for a compromise so that I can spend time doing other things.

Long story :

I wanted encounters, room layouts, and decorations to all are randomly placed at runtime. Now usually the issue that arises from that is that there are off cases where the player can't navigate through the randomness. However, the way I was trying to do it prevented this issue by only randomizing specific locations and items. This completely ignored the issues of pure randomness but required more time to go through and set up specific things. However, that was still less time than it would take me to manually build each room.

The major issue I faced was with how I generated the level. Since I was using unreal's level streaming I couldn't specifically find the instance of an item to randomize it and if I tried to add a randomizer to the room itself it would result in a crash due to the randomizer trying to edit the level data while it was being streamed.

Now while there is likely a solution out there I don't have the time to rebuild the level generation code. I would like to switch it from loading each level and ancoring it off the center to anchoring off a doorway so that I can make rooms of any size and shape. I could also only load the room the player is in and rooms next to it. Thus improving performance anchoring. If I could time travel I would go back two weeks and tell myself to use that approach, because me two weeks ago didn't think of that.

(I don't know if an image exists to express my frustration)