I’m not a total newbie to engines and visual scripting, but I’m still somewhat of a beginner. My most recent experience was with Unity and I have to realize that there are quite a few differences in the workflow in Unreal. (I also realize that Unreal uses ‘child’ for other things than Unity. When I speak of children (or parents) in this post, I mean the transform/attach children of objects in the hierarchy.)
I’m currently sitting on a project based on UE 5’s VR template, mostly working with actors based on the GrabComponent and Grabbable_SmallCube blueprints.
I now want to make something like a button, and for simplicity’s sake want to implement it through an extension of the GrabComponent’s TryGrab function, since that seemed like the easiest approach.
My goal is: I have an actor ‘map’ which has a number of child ‘mapEntry’ child actors (currently three, later to be spawned in randomized numbers and positions.
Each of these mapEntry actors has a GrabComponent child. When the Motion Controller interact with that GrabComponent, the mapEntry is supposed to be marked as ‘activated’.
The only somewhat working method I found so far is to give the GrabComponent a bool that the mapEntry actor can then read.
This isn’t an ideal solution for many reasons.
I don’t want it to run on an event tick, that just seems like potential trouble down the like.
It would be best if I can have the GrabComponent send an Event to its parent mapEntry actor, but I can’t figure out how to do that (or if it’s possible at all).
Also, when a mapEntry gets activated, I need to either be able to deactivate input on all other mapEntry actors, OR, when a mapEntry gets activated, I need it to deactive the ‘activated’ bool on all other mapEntry actors (either directly from a mapEntry actor, or some other external actor blueprint like the map actor).
I’m obviously out of my depth here, and I’m usually fairly good at googling my problems away, but I’m stumbling over some fundamentals here I think. Any advice for handing any of these problems?
Related issue: With the existing blueprints from the VR Template, the Motion Controller can communicate on button input. But I would like it to do things on hover (e.g. change color on an interactive object). I tried to make the BeginActorOverlap work, but this is doing absolutely nothing. Any suggestions here?
