Any Good On-Rails BP Resources For UE4/5?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Hi all! I’m currently learning Blueprints with UE4.27, and one genre I’ve really been itching to dig into is on-rails shooters (House of the Dead, Dead Space: Extraction, etc.)

I love this style of aiming in general, like how Silent Hill: Shattered Memories uses it to aim your flashlight dynamically rather than in a static format. Being able to implement it into some prototypes would be amazing!

Spline tutorials are also welcome, but I’ve at least found a few of those on my own. Far as the aiming system: my goal is being able to toggle a free-floating reticule that follows the mouse cursor, ideally with a bounding box around said cursor.

I imagine it’d be a combination of a HUD widget, some animation blending for the weapon to track the cursor, and float interpolation to line everything up. But I also know I’m enough of a noob at this that any sort of guide or reference to draw from would do wonders.

However, I haven’t been able to find anything. The closest thing I could find was a 2D platformer aiming system, and that tutorial didn’t even have voiceover. There’s not even a preset available on the UE Marketplace. Any assistance is greatly appreciated!

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You can use software cursors in UE5 (I can’t verify, but I’m assuming this is also the case for 4.27). There are a bunch of cursor types given by default. You can override any of them to a UMG.

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and you can set the current cursor type in your controller with SetCurrentMouseCursor

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As for getting the arm to follow the cursor, I don’t have a resource or a solid example, but you can probably do some math with the cursors screen position to add a slight local offset to the arm model or a particular bone in the animation blueprint. I’ve not had a need for anything like that personally, but if something springs to mind I’ll drop back in.

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Intriguing - I’ll give this a try see if it works in UE 4.27. Worst case scenario, I can finish implementing what I’ve got and transfer over to UE5 to implement this.

Thanks!