The Player Glow Conundrum

Suggestions
1

So common knowledge for why Player Glow is unfinished, is due to how taxing draw calls are for a true outline glow on players, especially if tens of players all have it equipped at once. It would hurt performance SIGNIFICANTLY.

My suggestion, or a workaround could possibly to use the same method used in SDNL for its respawns; applying an overlayed material on the player. This material could use similar techniques used by other glow materials where the edges are quite vivid and bright, but the further into the model it can fade out and be transparent.

I don’t know if it’s possible to also make this material quite reactive to bloom, as a makeshift ‘glow outline’ but a part of me feels this might result in some awful visual bugs.

I’m not going to pretend however that I know this would work, I’ve never touched UE4. But surely there is a method to the madness on creating a pseudo player glow/outline that avoids performance impact too negatively.

2

Other than performance, we also have a set amount of stencil masks we can use. Each player will need its own stencil mask ID set so each player can adjust their own glow color, otherwise it’ll be the same color for each player.

I plan to get this feature done when we finish up the other milestones such as Accelerate.

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