Area Monitors

Area Monitors are a versatile tool that can be used in a variety of scenarios to trigger events, monitor objects, and manage audio.

• To create an Area Monitor, you need to use an Area Monitor node and relate that node to the object that has the boundary you want to monitor. To create this relation, you must connect an object reference to the Area Monitor node's Monitor Object pin. The node will then recognize the boundary of the object and monitor any objects that enter or exit that area.

• The Get Objects in Area Monitor node can be used in conjunction with the Area Monitor node to get a list of objects that have entered or exited the monitored area during an unrelated event.

• By plugging the Area Monitor node into the appropriate "____ Area" nodes, you can trigger events in the game when objects enter or exit the monitored area. Examples of these nodes include Player Entered Area and Object Exited Area.

• Area Monitors can also be registered as audio zones using the Register Audio Zones node. If you want to remove an audio zone, you can use the Unregister Audio Zone node.

• When tracking something to see if it is in the zone or not, to change its traits, keep lists up to date, etc, it is almost always more efficient to have circuits set up tracking enter/exit events and modifying those things at the time of those events than constantly polling the contents of the zone using a timer.

• It has been observed that there is a limit of 98 Area Monitors that can be active at any given time within a game.

  • To investigate the limitations of Area Monitors, a test script was created to poll the contents of an Area Monitor and return it as an object-scope object list. This list was then retrieved in another part of the game's code to check its size. The testing was initially conducted using Enter/Exit events, and the same result was obtained.

  • Upon surpassing the 98 Area Monitor limit, attempts to retrieve the contents of Area Monitors resulted in empty object lists.

• Dynamic Objects that are located in Area Monitors at Round Start will trigger On Object Entered Area at the start of each round.

Contributors Captain Punch Cookies