I spent all day working on a mod to the latest version of UFE 2.  After spending a week designing my first 6 stages for UFE 2, I learned a lot, and developed some more ideas about what I want to be able to do with UFE 2.

I want to be able to have my stages be existing large environments that don't need to be rotated perfectly for UFE 2 since they are setup in a grid alignment of their own already and it would be inconvenient if they were rotated.  Perhaps even allow multiple areas of these environments to be stages without having to make a lot of changes, or even have dynamic stage transitions within the same scene, so in order to do that, UFE 2 engine needed changes.   

I also don't like taking natural 3d environments and forcing the ground to be 100% flat for the area the characters fight in, since it makes it less appealing and I'm doing more work moving things in scenes that already look very nice and organic.  I think it would be cool to move through some slight elevation and have the camera see other areas easier with more height differences.

I figured out how to modify the engine to do both of these things for walking today.

https://www.farbeyondcode.com/z/-vf.0.0 … 9D2E4F12C3

I made it possible for the plane they walk on to be rotated in addition to the built in position feature.  I am raycasting to find the ground y position at small spacing intervals at the initial stage load, which makes it very efficient since it is just an array operation after that. 

I'm still working through the details for jumping, collisions, projectiles, throws, and more on this feature since I've had to change a lot of things to calculating in local space instead of world space to do this.

This mode I'm working on will depend on z axis movement feature being disabled since I want to focus on just the 2d plane with up for jumps at first since my stages are currently designed for a single camera view and I prefer to control the camera for now, however, I think it would be interesting to develop a 3d movement feature where the plane the players fight on is actually a curved path and when you walk left/right they would rotate around something, like a big spiral staircase or a garden path with focal point like a large tree while still having z axis movement disabled so that jump works with the up button.  There are a lot of scenes that would look even better with a slight curve to the path which wouldn't disrupt the gameplay.   For this, I was thinking about accessing the vertices and normals in a very simple probuilder-created path in the stages in order to build up a simple to edit 3d data structure visually and then make UFE 2 able to have the player able to move in 3d space with just 2d left/right movement.  This has been done in some games like bloodstained on the castle staircase which is a pretty cool effect with the benefit of keeping the camera movement automated so that complex 2d gameplay is easier.

https://youtu.be/khpA1l_Tb8k?t=96

I'm also getting familiar with the UFE 2 physics and collision systems since I want to make new UFE 2 interface features to support environmental collisions and interactivity to break/throw/take damage from non-player objects while still using UFE 2 fight moves and rules for this.  Some of them might function like a projectile but with new options made to trigger it because it wouldn't be a move.  The environment could be like a third character with its own AI rules.

Just sharing what I'm working on, if anyone is interested.