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Video Summary
Summary
Core Theme
Narrative Navigator is a plugin for game development that enhances player experience by adding various map and navigation features, including compasses, mini-maps, world maps, points of interest with fast travel, and custom waypoint systems, all designed to be easily integrated and customizable.
[Music]
hello and welcome to this quick start
guide on how to use the narrative
Navigator plugin I'm here in the
narrative content examples Hall and
narrative Navigator essentially adds a
bunch of Navigators to your game
Navigators are like the compass that you
can see the mini map that you can see it
comes with a world map which I'm using
with a game pad right now but if I
switch to mouse and keyboard it
seamlessly moves over and allows for
either input to work um and you can see
I've got some STS here with some of the
features here I'm showing overrides you
can see I've got a different icon on the
compass as I do on the mini map you can
see movement is really easily handled
even points of interest is a really cool
one so points of interest is very common
in open World Games you might have a
city or something here I've got
narrative City and once you discover the
point of interest you can then fast
travel to it so that's a little feature
that I added as well and these are all
saved to dis so if you find a point of
Interest it will be saved when you come
back into the game it will be remembered
also custom waypoints can be placed on
your world map if I press a to place a
waypoint down these are saved to dis if
I save my game and come back in these
will be right where I lift them so these
are really good for open World Games as
well you might want to add custom way
points to remember where you need to
go and of course if you're using
narrative 3 to handle your your quest
and your dialogue it works really well
for Quest you can see it's telling me to
talk to Jack this is a quest objective
and I'll show you how to handle those
with Navigator as well you can see once
I finish the quest
objective it removes the marker right so
it it works really well with quests and
we'll talk about that later you do not
have to use it with quests though
narrative Navigator works really well on
its own and it also works really well
with the other
plugins in order to follow along with
today's video you'll need a copy of
narrative Navigator the link to buy that
will be in the description and you will
also need a copy of narrative common UI
the link to grab that will also be in
the description narrative common UI is
free to download it's a framework that
all of the UI for the narrative tools is
built on I'm going to be using 5.3 today
but you can use 5.1 5.2 or 5.3 and we're
going to go to games and make a new
third person blueprint project you can
call it whatever you want put it
wherever you want and then click on
create okay so I'm here and inside of my
project I'm going to go to edit plugins
and make sure that I have narrative
common UI and narrative Navigator
enabled pretty much all of the narrative
tools require that you set up narrative
common UI so make sure that you do that
it's very easy to do you want to go to
Project settings search for viewport
make sure that you're using the common
game viewport client and then you also
want to go to Common input settings make
sure that you select your narrative input
input
data and then in under
Windows I'm using Windows if you're
using a different platform like Linux or
something else you might want to put it
in there but I'm going to put it in um
Windows we're going to change the
default game pad name to generic I'm
going to add two controller datas we're
going to add keyboard and then because
I'm using an Xbox controller today as
well we're going to do Gamepad Xbox once
you've done that click on restart now
okay we're back inside the project let's
get started so we're going to go to
third person blueprint PRS and there's
quite a bit of stuff the third person
template doesn't come with so we just
have to quickly add it it's not a big
deal just go to blueprint class you want
to add a player controller so we'll say
BP PC go into your game
mode and then you want to select player
controller that we just made and then
we're also going to add some HUD because
narrative Navigator is essentially a HUD
based sort of plugin so we're going to
make a demo HUD for this project so
we'll just call it widget blueprint
HUD and I'll just drag in a canvas
panel I'm going to drag in a narrative
HUD generally you want to have one of
these on your on your HUD and we're
going to make it fill up the whole
screen so just follow what I'm doing
here and then nowar of Navigator comes
with a bunch of what are called
Navigators and if you search for
navigator and the pallet you'll find a
bunch of them so I'm going to drag a
navigator Compass onto my canvas panel
and then I'll select the compass here
and I'm going to put it in the top of
the screen so I'll do 0 0 600 60 0.5 for
my alignment if I'm position y I'll do
40 so you can see the compass is sort of
in the top middle of the screen here I'm
also going to drag a mini map Navigator
onto my canvas
panel and I will make that 400 by 400
and you can put it wherever you like I'm
going to go for the top right
corner so that's going to be my my mini
map screen space markers are a nice one
to have as well so we're going to drag
that onto our canvas panel and we're
going to go to Anchors and do 0000 Z so
that it takes up the whole
screen and then we'll compile and save
this and we're going to add it to the
screen so we'll open up our player
controller we'll go to begin play create
Widget the HUD we just
made going to promote it to a variable
we'll just call that
HUD and then we'll do
add to [Music]
[Music]
viewport the other thing we need to do
is make sure you have a navigation
component on your player
controller we're going to add one like
this um now the only option that
actually matters here is Max custom
waypoints these options here are Legacy
and they'll be removed you won't see
these in future versions uh but we will
compile save and we'll come into the map
here and we'll hit play you'll see that
it doesn't really work right um You can
see that the the map's just sort of
showing this default blue grid um it's
not quite working yet in the main issue
is that we don't have a nice lovely
screenshot of our map um so narrative
Navigator comes with the great tool
called the map tile generator that does
this for you and the way narrative
Navigator works is it generates a grid
of tiles and that way no matter what
size your map is you can generate a uh
map grid for it so if you go to plugins
narrative Navigator content yours might
be in the engine folder plugins by the
way uh but wherever you have yours go to
assets map tile generator and then right
click on the utility generate map tiles
and run the utility
widget and basically this is going to
take a screenshot of the
map you might want to hide some things
if you don't want them to show up so for
example these shamer cubes I'm just
going to click the I to hide those I
don't want them in my map screenshot I
mean generally you probably um scrub the
screenshots up a bit in Photoshop anyway
uh but for this example we'll just hide
them and the last thing we need to do is
just drag in a map tile bound this is basically
basically
how your map screenshot will be taken
and the default one is way too big for
our map um so we might want to go into
map width and sort of turn the width
down a bit and by default it uses three
tiles so it'll be a 3X3 grid each tile
is 1024x 1024 pixels so this will be
plenty of resolution if not way more
than we need the height is also
important you need to make sure it's
high enough so that it's above the map
so that it takes the the image
correctly so once you've got that placed
correctly we'll go into our um map tile
generator click on generate
tiles I've actually already got some so
what I'll do is I'll just delete the
existing ones that I have if I go into
here I've generated a few previously so
I'm going to delete my ones if you click
it it'll generate them all it basically
just moves a camera over the map and
saves it to a texture you can see here
is it here
anyhow once you do that if I hit play
you'll see it actually shows the map now
if I run around it's a little bit too
zoomed in um for my personal
liking and so if you want to zoom it out
very easily done we're going to go to
widget blueprint HUD go back to here
click on our mini
map and we are going to go to map zoom
and just make it
0.2 and if we save that you can see now
if I go back into the game the map is
nice and zoomed out so we've got some
Navigators like the compass screen space
the the mini map markers but how do we
actually add markers to things well
we're going to add a marker to those
cubes so I'm going to come back in here
and reshow these and I'll just add it to
one of the cubes so we'll add it to this one
one
here I'm going to click on ADD going to
search for marker and add a navigation
marker and that's it if I hit play
that'll just work already if I hit play
you can see on the compass it's showing
up on my mini map it's showing that
marker but if you click the navigation
marker we can do a lot more than that so
if we got a default marker settings we
could for example change the color of
the uh map marker we could make it more
blue we could change the name for
example we could say Cube and you can
also change sort of the domain of the
marker where does it get added to you
can see add marker to if I check screen
space it will actually add it to the
screen space Navigator now you can see
in my screen space there is a cube
marker that shows up or for example if I
didn't want it to show up on the compass
I could just come in here and uncheck
compass and now if I hit play you can
see the icon won't be on my compass so
you can show um you can choose where it
shows up we're going to go back into our
controller and I just want to show you
something here if we do face button top
I'm going to make it so when I press the
y key on my game pad it opens the world
map so the world map is like a bigger
map that you can sort of zoom into and
add way points to it's a bit more
complex than the mini map and so we're
going to do get narrative
HUD and then we can open a menu
depending on how many narrative tools
you're using you'll see more or less
options here but we want the narrative
menu world map that comes with Navigator
I'm also going to duplicate this and
select the m key so that on my keyboard
save hit play and if I have a game pad
if I press y on my game pad you can see
it will open the world map and in the
bottom corner it says place custom
waypoints so if I press a you can see it
actually places a custom wavepoint and
you can see that has appeared on the
level and these actually get saved to
dis I'll show you a bit more about those
later but the cool thing is this world
map it has a little reticle and it
supports zooming in and out and if I
just switch over to a mouse and keyboard
you can see it instantly changes and
instantly starts working with the mouse
and keyboard as well you can see it's
not going to let me zoom in very far so
we can sort of Tinker with these things
a bit further than we have in our HUD as
well we also want to make sure the
narrative HUD is on top of everything
else you would have seen just there the
world map didn't look very good if I put
it on top of everything else now you can
see it looks a lot better so just make
sure that you have the narrative hard in
front of everything else the RO map is
pretty cool you can see if I hover over
the cube it actually tells me it's the
cube and there's even um interactable
things so there's sort of points of
interest that you can fast travel to
that we'll talk about in a little bit
one of the other things you might really
want to do is change the style of some
of the map things so for example the
mini map in the corner can easily be
styled to whatever you want if we click
on the mini map
here expand the map style section
there's a bunch of styles that come with
it so if we do distorted Edge flat
border for example it's quite an
interesting style if I hit play you can
see I've got this sort of metal Edge and
it's also warping the edges of the of
the map it might be a little bit hard to
see but if you look at that marker it
sort of looks like it's got a glass top
the map so it's quite interesting
effect I think distorted Edge without
the flat bord is probably a little bit
of a bit
look actually I kind of like the Border
more so you can play around and see what
you like for your game and you can
always add more this is just a data
table and if I open that up you can see
you can easily create your own Styles um
if you want
them also just going to put my mini map
here see one annoying thing with my
world map here is it's not letting me
Zoom very far into the world map um and
that's because it's a it's quite a small
map so generally it wouldn't let you
zoom that far uh because we have a small
map we want to be able to zoom a lot
further into the map um if if you're
noticing this text here by the way this
is just an unreal render Target thing
usually you wouldn't have this because
you wouldn't have just empty
Sky it's because there's nothing below
the map it puts that little error
message in there so I wouldn't worry
about it in a real game you You' never
really see
that um
anyways uh let me show you how to let
the the map zoom out
further if you want to change the zoom
amounts what you can do is go to
narrative Navigator go into the widgets
folder navigation widgets and open up
the world map Navigator so Navigator map
world if you open that up
in the graph
defaults you should be able to change
the Min and Max Zoom values actually
have to click on Navigator map here and
here it is here yeah Min Zoom amount so
you consider Min and Max Zoom amount I
might go with 0.0
0.0
05 and we'll see if that lets me Zoom further
further
in oh that's letting me Zoom further
out so if I do maximum amount
example it'll let me zoom in a lot
further there we go so I can now zoom in
quite far you obviously don't want to
zoom in too far because you'll start to
see pixels and and
blurriness uh but that's a lot better
and you can see if I start using a
controller it just automatically allows
me to use a controller if you see the
message there it just says that the
there's a sky sphere that's not being
rendered so if you've been paying
attention you'll know how to add a
player to the map you just open up our
player and just add a marker to it
navigation marker boom done if I hit
play you can see our player shows up on
the marker they also show up on the
compass though which is not really
they're not really supposed to do that
it's all we need to do again let's just
go to add marker to uncheck
compass and there's also quite a few
markers that actually come with
narrative Navigator out of the box we're
going to change to the player icon and
I'm also going to make our player be
sort of a nice glow and I'm going to
check the box that says show actor
rotation and that way it will show the
rotation of the actor and you can see
now we've got quite a nice little
marker looks pretty good I'll also go to
the display name and I'm just going to
say your
player and what that's going to do is if
I ever open the world map and hover over
our player you can see it says your player
Gally you don't need to worry about
transforms like you can see if I walk
into this box you can see the marker is
just moving itself around you don't have
to do anything it's all coded to sort of
work for
you other things you might want to do is
you can see this this Cube's got this
sort of default marker on it and we've
given it a nice blue color let's say you
want it to have a different color on the
mini map as you do for the other
Navigators I'm going to select the cube
here and if you go to its marker you've
got all these override settings so if
you ever want it to have a different
color on the mini map for example you
can go down to ey content and we can
make it green for example on the mini
map and now if I hit play you can see it
will be green on the mini map but it
will be blue everywhere else so it's
quite nice to be able to do
overrides if you go into narrative
Navigator content blueprints you've got
this BP point of Interest actor and this
is quite an interesting actor so I'll
show you how this works if you drag it
into the level you can create a bit of a
point of Interest so that's obviously a
Fe that a lot of open World Games would
want so here's my point of interest and
to configure the point of Interest we're
going to go to POI tags going to click
add uh you do need to go to source and
select a source and I'm just going to say
say
pis Dot and then I'll give it some sort
of name uh Circle
Circle
thingy and I'll move this point of
interest to the circle thingy
also want to give it a display name so
we're going to set the display name to
to
Circle thingy I'm going to make sure I
select that tag that I made and you can
um make them a little bit more organized
than this if you
want so with this all set up and placed
in the level um the other thing you want
to configure is this fast travel
location so fast traveling is sort of a
feature that's been built in and it
works with these poi so you can put this
wherever you
want and I'll just show you in the
current version it won't actually show
the notification message but you can see
when I run up to it it turns from a
transparent color to sort of a visible
color so we've now discovered this POI
and once you discover a point of
interest if you hover over it you can
now fast travel to it and if I click on
it you can see it will Fast Travel me
based on where I put that fast travel
spot um so it's quite nice and it works
with World partitions for bigger Maps as
well it'll make sure the area of the map
has actually been loaded and before it
fast travels you if I use a game pad
same thing I can move over to the POI I
can hit a and it will Fast Travel me to
the location if I just restart the game
I just want to show you if you try and
hover over the location that you haven't
discovered yet it will not actually show
you that you can fast travel to it it'll
show you the location name but nothing
else you won't actually be able to
interact with
it if you're using narrative three
quests I've got a quest here I'm going
to accept
it and you can see it adds a marker we
have to talk to backer we're going to
talk to him and it should remove the
marker and it should tell me to go back
to Jack you can see you can add Quist
markers how do you do that what all you
do is you can see we've got a um a task
here for example just add an event and
there's one that comes with the plugin
it is ADD navigation marker and this
lets you add a quest marker you give it
a task ID and it automatically will add
it to the right thing and it will remove
the marker when you complete the task so
that's kind of a nice way to have it set
up with quests there might be a bit more
of a robust way to do it or a way that
will work better for your game but
that's a nice buil-in way into the
plugin that lets you do that um do that
within quests last thing I want to show
you that I I think I said I would talk
about is the custom waypoints so with
the mouse and keyboard you can double
click to add custom waypoints uh but how
do you save them to disk well it's
really easy to do we're going to go into our
up I'm going to hook the one key up to
save the game and I'm going to hook the
2 key up to load the
game drag in narrative
navigation save when we press the one
key and load when we press the two key
it not only saves every Waypoint you
found it also saves every uh point of
interest that you've discovered which is
really useful so when your player comes
back to your game it'll remember all of
the pois you found before which is
really useful so what I'll do I'll just
prove this we'll go ahead and discover
the cirle POI that I made and we will
add couple of way points
and then we'll hit one on my keyboard to
save we'll close the game we'll come
back everything's gone now but if we
press two boom loads it all back in it
remembers that we' found this POI so
really nice all saved to disk just like
all the other narrative plugins so that
is a general overview of how to use
narrative Navigator hopefully that has
been helpful and if you need any more
help of course we're always around in
the Discord and the link for that will
be in the description so yeah I hope you
pick up next and give it a go thanks for
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