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API and examples?


Bil Simser
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I watched the GDC talk about Firewatch and how they used SECTR to dynamically load up outside areas (rather than splitting up the terrain in equal sections like SECTR does today). I'm assuming they just used portals and designated areas to manually do this? The Firewatch work was done with a very old version of SECTR (and Unity). Is the current version have an API with the same capabilities to use in an outdoor setup and manually trigger loading/unloading of user defined sectors?

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I do not know which exact technique they used exactly, but generally speaking this should be possible in multiple ways - you could use a region loader with a relatively small load size for example, and just set up bigger chunks of your level as sectors to be loaded as soon as the region touches it, so as soon as you come close to the end of one section, the other one would load in. You would not need to have portals set up for this, and you also do not need to have those evenly cut up sector shapes from a terrain either.
If you do set up portals, there is a neighbor loader which will automatically load all neighbors n-deep.
Last but not least would be a custom technique, SECTR has a Loader class that you could inherit / extend, but if you have a reference to the SECTR_Chunk class that you want to load, you would need to "add a reference" to it which means "hey I request that thing to be loaded now". There is a method on the SECTR_Chunk class that does just that (from the API documentation):
image.png

So you could also just do a simple trigger collider that has a reference to the correct SECTR_Chunk and calls AddReference to it, and then removes the reference again as well at some point to unload.

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Thanks Peter, I'll take a look at the API documentation and see if that works. The triggers they use are just walls they setup in the level based on anticipating which way the player would be going and loading in predefined sectors based on the position of the trigger (one for loading and one for unloading).

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