I am newish to Unreal Engine 4 and I just wondering what would be the best way to have time advance only when player triggers it while showing what Day it is and what part of day it is on the HUD?
I could make a new map for every day and time of the day with characters in their new positions, the different lighting, events and what have you, but I feel that will waste a lot of space lol
Is there a way to store each day+time of day as a variable everything calls on?
You can hold date in DateTime type and then use Time Span to manipulate date, note it also contain clock time but i would recomand oyu to do enum with phases of the day insted. DateTime also will calculate day of week for you.
As for HUD, if oyu gonna do scrolling like persona does, you need to create widget with series of data position and based on current date, fill text boxes current date and surounding once on construct and then make animation that will scroll the widget, that most simple way you could do that with UMG, Changing phases should be a lot simpler just make UMG animation switching between them.
Once you got day advancing then you can make any conditional code, you can make actors with components disabled and enable it when conditions are met. There lot of way you can approach it and it mainly depends how you organize your levels.