Does anyone know if there is a way to convert a getActorName that I get from colliding with an object, into a reference, so that I can then manipulate that specific object?
Seems like there should be something simple.
I seem to have resolved this myself in the five minutes I have between putting my sons to bed, such is the life of an Indie Game developing father of two.
So essentially instead of having the collider on my pickups like the tutorial EU4 content Examples (Advanced scripting). I wanted to put the collider on another object that is sort of an object waiting for a puzzle piece, in my game it happens to be the alphabet and this is one of the letterColliders that I have in an unsolved word. (It’s a game for kids in particular dyslexic kids which I have some experience with).
But I digress.
The A_Collider_BOX has to check for the appropriate tag (does the letter pickup match) and then since there may be multiple pickup letters that could match, I need to identify any one of the multiples. So I connect Other Actor to “Set ActivePickup” . A lot of that stuff below that is just me testing the GetClass, the Get ObjectName and the making sure i could identify the object as the actual in game object (an actor reference not just the string name is important here. If I identify the string with Get Object Name, it will print the name I want, but not actually select it so i can manipulate it, the way an Actor Reference node does. In other words i cannot pass the Get ObjectName to my Set Active Pickup variable, however i can route the Other Actor from my collider here! That’s the simple solution I was looking for.)
There is an intermittent gray box area that is just about dropping the object before I manipulate it, if the user hasn’t already. If I don’t do this, it plays with my SaveGame creating chaos which is unrelated to this.
The green comment box ends with me getting the ActivePickup that I identified and manipulating it. Then i do a bunch of other things before returning to the levelBlueprint with this information to increment my number of pickups needed to finish this “puzzle”. Mind you I can use this for any puzzle in game whether it’s words or not.
A couple weeks ago I was doing most of this manually, setting up words that had to be “solved” and other puzzles, and it took me at least an hour to do one word and test it, so in one busy day I could make maybe six to eight among other tasks and I realized it would take THOUSANDS of hours to just program the puzzles in game and that I needed a new solution, a tool to do it.
I found that tool in Blutilities (which I’ve written about elsewhere on the forum) and finishing up this bit of logic in the Collider Class, I have made it something I can run in under a minute for each puzzle. This is important when dealing with thousands of words/puzzles in a game, and this is different than the tutorial in contentExamples because I’m using the ColliderClass to track the pickups that are pickedUp.
Anyway, I try to follow up some of my posts with real world solutions because i hate when I search through a thread and someone ends with, “oh i figured it out” and share no information about how they did so. I hope this is helpful to others searching.
-finn