This game is a 3D FPS game, made by unreal engine 4, with EasyAntiCheat, simple encryption, and a proprietary UE4 plugin.
First of all, the game itself doesn't provide any map overview. So to make an interactive map, I have to acquire an image of a top-down overview of the map at the very least.
The approach I've tried is a failure, the gist is this, unpack the game file, open it with Unreal editor, and take a 2d camera shot from the sky, done. But unfortunately, this game adopts a proprietary plugin that only the developer has, so I have no way to load the game file into the Unreal editor because the unreal editor keeps telling me I miss a plugin. And apparently, you can't just load the map data into your own unreal editor instance, it just doesn't get recognized at all.
The other approach I come up with is the hacking approach, the gist is this, made a fly hack, fly to the sky, take a screenshot, done. But there are so many problems with this approach, just to name a few. 1. Your screenshot is essentially from a perspective camera, for a top-down overview, it is best to use an orthographic camera, I wonder if there's a hack that can enable an orthographic camera for you tho. 2. For performance consideration, the game impaired your vision with smog for faraway objects, which typically will gonna happen if you try to capture the whole map because you want to be far away since you are using a perspective camera. I believe there are ways to remove smog, one method is modding, trying to find that sweet smog parameter and set it to 0 or something.
Right now the biggest roadblock for me is acquiring a map overview, the other parts like web design, are pretty insignificant compared to this task.
This project is very exciting for me, but I don't have much exposure to this topic, I would like to know your insight into this problem, and by any chance do you know a similar project like this so I can follow it? Thank you very much.
|