I’m new to Unreal and have been reading the docs about characters. I’m finding this line confusing: “ Unlike Pawns, Characters come with a SkeletalMeshComponent to enable advanced animations that use a skeleton”. Don’t pawns also use skeletal mesh? On another page it says “Skeletal Mesh Actors are commonly used to represent player characters, NPCs, other animated creatures, and complex machinery”, which seemingly contradicts that other statement?
Character class includes a capsule for collissions and skeletalmesh as part of the class. this class also has implemented special functionality like walking and run. Its parent class is Pawn class.
This special class has also a lot of optimizations for multiplayer replication that are not in Pawn or other classes.
A Pawn is a more basic class that can be possesed ( you can view from a camera on the class for example ) and can receive players inputs for controlling. Pawn dont have walk or other characters special funcionallity and dont include a skeletal mesh as default ‘template’ but you can add it as component and implement all the special logic you need.
You are more right than wrong. The documentation is not explicitly unambiguous on this point. A Pawn can use a SkeletalMeshComponent, but it doesn’t automatically come with one nor does it require one.
What makes the Pawn (and thus the Character) unique from other Actors is that a Controller (Player or NPC) can possess it.
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