Custom Difficulty for Custom Levels

Custom Map Difficulty Overview

With the Los Suenos Stories update, the AILevelData.ini was refactored into three Difficulty.ini

Custom difficulties can also be created and included with your map pak. This can be loaded with your map, without other map or mods conflicting. Users/other modders can also create patch _P difficulty paks specifically for your map if they want to tweak the experience.

This means, optionally, you can stop using the BP_SpawnManager_v3 and instead use the game’s native spawn Min and Max configs as well as spawn groups.

This also lets you configure much more such as

• The number of bomb actors so you don’t need a BP_BombSpawner either. Also bomb times.
• The number of roaming suspects or civs
• Open doors percentage
• Locked doors percentage
• The max amount of traps and pre-placed traps
• Allowed trap types
• Explosive vest civs and suspects
• AS timers

Setup

A) Gameplay Tags

Unreal gameplay tags are used as the “key” values in the gameplay code, so we need to add one for each new difficulty.

1. In Unreal Engine, open Project Settings > Gameplay Tags
2. Open Manage Gameplay Tags...
3. Select CustomDifficulty and press the + plus icon.
4. Name your new tag CustomDifficulty.MAPNAME.DIFFLEVEL

   If your just creating one difficulty, just use CustomDifficulty.MAPNAME.Standard
   If you want one for each diff add a Standard, Casual, and Hard

   The name doesn’t matter, however DO NOT create your tags under the base Difficulty group as this will make it show in the selector for players in quickplay for example, which is not how we want to use it.

   Make sure you create the new diff in the MyCustomGameplayTags.ini source. You can find this in your configs and can migrate it when the framework updates.

B) Difficulty.ini

1. In your project’s /Config/Difficulties/ create your new difficulty either by renaming/copying the example CustomMapDifficulty_RoN_Difficulty_Standard.ini or export a difficulty from the game files using FModel.
2. Rename your new difficulty CustomMapDifficulty_MAPNAME_DIFFLEVEL.ini

   This name doesn’t matter, just a suggested convention.

   Delete the example difficulty if you don’t want to do it every time you cook your map.

3. Open the new diff to edit.
4. Set DifficultyGameplayTag = to the tag you created in Step A).
5. Also edit the tag in GameplayTagList to the tag you created, within "".

    [Info]
    DifficultyGameplayTag = CustomDifficulty.ExampleMap.Standard
    DifficultyNameKey = 
    DifficultyDescriptionKey = DO NOT USE
   
    [/Script/GameplayTags.GameplayTagsList]
    GameplayTagList=(Tag="CustomDifficulty.ExampleMap.Standard",DevComment="")
   

6. At the bottom of the ini, add the file name of your custom level with square brackets [].
   If you copied the example ini, you can replace “[RoN_DifficultyExampleMap]”
7. Add your map configs below this header and save the file.

    [RoN_DifficultyExampleMap]
    MinCivilians = 1
    MaxCivilians = 10
    MinSuspects = 1
    MaxSuspects = 10
    UseSpawnGroups = true
    MinSuspects_Group1 = 1
    MinSuspects_Group1 = 3
    MinCivilians_Group1 = 1
    MaxCivilians_Group1 = 1 ; use semi colons for comments
   

C) Map Setup

1. Delete your spawn manager or set Is Editor Only Actor = True, so it won’t interfere.
2. For AI spawns, you won’t be using Spawn with Tags for groups.
   • Instead, set the Group ID to the number at the end of MinSuspects_Group or MinSuspects_Group etc that you defined in your CustomDifficulty.ini
   • I’d recommend NOT using group 0, so that your sure your changes are working.
   • If your not using groups, then nothing needs to be set. Civs and suspects will spawn according to the Min/MaxCivilians and Min/MaxSuspects values.
3. To load your custom diff, place a /Content/Mods/Template/Blueprints/BP_LoadCustomDifficulty blueprint in your level.
4. Set the Fallback Difficulty to the tag you created in Step A).
5. Expand the Difficulty Map fully (shift + click).
   • For the value of each key, add your custom gameplay tag.
   • If you created 3 difficulties, map each to the relevant vanilla gameplay tag.
     This lets the user pick which they want to use based on their vanilla selection.

D) Cooking

By default, unreal won’t copy the /Config/Difficulties/ folder.
To make things easier, we added a custom cook button to the level editor toolbar.
After cooking is completed, /Config/Difficulties/ is copied to your cooked folder, next to content.

To include your CustomDifficulty.ini

1. Press the Custom cook button:

   You can see successful copy actions in the output log.

   You can disable the custom cook copy step in Project Settings > Plugins > Framework Plugin Settings

2. When copying your cooked files to be paked, be sure to copy both /Content and /Config to your staged mod folder.
3. If you want to copy without cooking, press the Copy Difficulties button:

   You can see successful copy actions in the output log.

   You can use this to make changes to your CustomDifficulty.ini if your content is unchanged.

4. Play your map in game to confirm your config has loaded.