The View Controls Window contains visual controls intended to aid you in working with the Loading Blueprint Editor. While all controls effect the Editor Experience, none of the controls have any impact outside of the Editor.
The Window contains two buttons (Reset View (2D) and Reset View (3D)) which allow you to reset the Camera in the event that you've lost track of the Pattern or just don't like the way the Camera looks.
When editing patterns in 3D Blueprints, it would be very difficult to see Cells if all Cells in the Pattern were opaque. As such, we have implemented a system whereby only a single Layer of Cells is opaque, and the rest are transparent. This allows you to see the overall pattern while keeping the editing work focused on a single Layer of Cells. This is especially important for selection based blueprints.
For larger Patterns, showing these transparent Cells can have a major negative impact on Editor performance. To account for this, the View Controls window includes an additional option called Hide Transparent Pattern Elements. Enable this option to stop the Editor from drawing the transparent cells.
The Blueprint Editor includes an incredibly powerful feature that allows you to replace the default cube Cells in the Pattern Editor with miniaturized meshes that better represent the objects that the Blueprint will be used with. This allows you to better visualize exactly what your World looks like in order to determine which Cells actually need to be included in Patterns.
Miniaturized meshes are generated using the Miniature Asset Generator, which you can read about in the Miniature Asset Generator Section of the Scriptable Assets Chapter.
Once you have created a Miniature Assets Generator and used it to generate miniature mesh assets, you can assign the generator to the Miniature Asset Generator field in the View Controls Window and the Pattern Editor's Cells will automatically start being drawn using the miniature meshes. Just remember that the Index of each Cell is used to choose which miniature mesh to use and those Indexes are determined according to the Streamable Grid Rows/Columns/Layers values set in the Main Controls Window. If the Miniature Asset Generator was used with a Streamable Grid with different Axes sizes than what is set on the Blueprint, the miniature meshes will still work but may not accurately represent the Cells that you think they should.
Drawing Cells in the Pattern Editor is not a free operation. For very large patterns with 100's or even 1000's of Cells, editor performance would drop to a snails pace if we drew every Cell. At the same time, when using a Blueprint where you can manually select Cells, we want to give you a large canvas of Cells to choose from. The Viewable Area is an imperfect solution to this problem and can be found in the View Controls Window via the Viewable Area tab.
It defines the region of Cells that are shown in the Pattern Editor and that are selectable by you and which can be manipulated. You can change its size to as large of a value as will work for your computer and you can change the region of Cells that are shown by modifying the Cell Start and End Values. The <, <<, >, and >> buttons allow you to shift the Viewable Area by a single Cell or by the entire size of the Viewable Area.
Do not worry about navigating away from already Enabled Cells. Once a Cell is Enabled, it remains Enabled even if it is not currently being shown in the Viewable Area!
To help you in identifying what region of Cells the Viewable Area corresponds to, you will notice that the first, middle, and last row/column/layer of Cells is marked. These values represent the indices of the those Cells on a theoretical Endless Grid, where the Inner Area Cell is Cell Row 1, Column 1, Layer 1.
If you lose track of what region of Cells you are viewing, you can always reset the Viewable Area using the Reset To Inner Area button. This button attempts to adjust the Viewable Area such that the Inner Area Key Cell is at its center.
The Text Display tab, in addition to the Cell Index Viewing Mode (which is covered in the Sections on each Blueprint Type), contains settings to control how text is displayed on the Cell Meshes within the Pattern Editor. These controls are necessary because the text writing shader utilizes the UV coordinates on whatever mesh is being drawn. Since these coordinates vary when miniature meshes are used, using a single value set would result in issues for many meshes. As such, we offer you these settings so that you can adjust the text drawing to work with whatever miniature meshes you might be using. These settings are stored on a per Blueprint basis, so that changing the settings does not affect any other Blueprints in the Repository.
These text drawing settings can be saved and loaded to/from the GlobalEditorSettings asset, which by default contains settings configured to work best with the default cube Cell meshes. If you change the settings at some point and then need to reset them, you can use the Reset All Below to Global Settings button. If you have configured the settings and want to be able to use them with other Blueprints, you can save them to the GlobalEditorSettings asset using the Save All Above to Global Settings button.
If at some point you want to revert the settings found in the GlobalEditorSettings back to the default settings (that work best with the default cube meshes), you can navigate to the GlobalEditorSettings asset to do so (found in the Assets/Editor Default Resources/Deep Space Labs/SAM/ScriptableAssets folder.
The Secondary Text usually displays the LOD of whatever Cells are being shown in the Pattern Editor, or the world Disabled for Cells that are not enabled. The only time this is not true is when viewing the Unique Pattern Selector Page for a Non Uniform Pattern, in which case the Secondary Text will either display Unique or Default depending on whether the Streamable Grid Cell has a unique pattern.