What is a Building Block? Let’s say you have a door mesh and you want it to open and close like a door. Currently we have to program this ourselves in blueprints. It would be nice if we just had an existing component called door that we could drag onto the mesh and it would act like a door. Maybe a door, door knob, and hinges components that we place on the door and then a component we hook to an actors hand. All components with configurable options to make it unique to our game. We could have a window in UE that lists all types of official Building Blocks and then a list of a repository of Building Blocks from the community. UE is extremely powerful but we could make it much more artist friendly with just changing sliders and options instead of having to write our own blueprints or material functions. What do you all think of a Building Block repository? Of course this won’t handle every use case but if we could knock out %50 of coding with Building Blocks and configuration options that would be awesome!
That’s exactly what blueprints are. Just have someone build the “door” blueprint, and when you need a door, place the blueprint, and then change the “static mesh asset” property to be whatever your partiucular door is.
Maybe there’s some asset pack on the marketplace that has these “lightly interactive” building blocks already? If not, that actually seems like a pretty good idea …
Yeah but you have to have someone build the door blueprint. Sure there is tons of stuff on the market place for all kinds of things. However, a nice set of Blueprints for common functionality that we can just choose from would be a nice addition especially for beginners and artists who want to focus on design and how the game works without having to find a coder or learn to code just to make a door open. And I am not limiting the Building Blocks to interactivity. That was just an example. They could be anything. I am not a professional in this industry but I know you could probably find many things that coders have to recode or have in their personal library that they reuse for every game they make. So we get together some of functionality that is common to almost any game and package them up as a searchable drag and drop library. Just a thought, we can code less and focus on our idea and creation more.