Course: Build a Third Person Character from Scratch

I’m gonna make more or less the same complaint as the previous course in the “welcome to game dev” learning path. I dislike that we are casually going through everything so quickly. There is some decently complicated stuff being breezed over in these tutorials and it bothers me.

As an example, in one of the videos in this course, we build a function that makes use of a node that has delta time as an input pin. Now, because of my previous game dev experience, I know what delta time is. But do newbies? Is anyone going to explain what delta time is? How about the other 20 pins being put to use in this function we are crafting?

Simple fact is, this tutorial covers a lot of actually complex tools. Am I really learning anything from this video? Maybe. Maybe it is meant to be a quick breeze through a high level look at the engine. I’m skeptical that this is all that helpful. How is someone supposed to properly create anything without a proper understanding of the tools?

I’ve just about completed step 4 of the “welcome to game dev” learning path, and realistically I don’t know if I could build any of these projects myself off the top of my head, largely because I don’t comprehend in any detail the tools I’m using.

Animation Blueprint: Character Pauses Mid-Air After Jump (UE5.2)

Hello everyone. I’m having an issue at the end of video 12 (Adding Jumping to Animation Blueprint). I think I’ve followed the video exactly, but when I press the spacebar, the bot jumps, then begins to fall, and then… stays suspended in mid-air for about two seconds before touching the ground. It looks like there’s a problem during the transition between the A_Bot_Fall animation and the A_Bot_LandIdle animation. I’m working with version 5.2. Thanks in advance, and thanks to the author for the great video.

StackOBot 5.6 does not work with Unreal Engine 5.6.1.
I followed the instructions very carefully but on step five after hooking up the input system, the character does not respond to input. (The camera can be rotated around the character but that’s it).

I compared to my friend’s version which he had done with StackOBot 5.4 in Unreal Engine 5.4.4 and absolutely everything that the course says to do was the same.

So I deleted and redid everything but mine still didn’t work.

I installed UE 5.4.4 alongside 5.6.1 and started a new StackOBot 5.4 and this one works.

I thought maybe I missed a step or something the first time, so I deleted StackOBot 5.6 and started again and confirmed that yup it still doesn’t work.

I’ve done the first five steps four times so I’m pretty certain I’m not missing anything.

In case it’s helpful, pressing the run button in 5.6 prints these “Play In Editor” log messages:

Blueprint Runtime Error: “Accessed None trying to read (real) property ActiveSpawnPad in GM_InGame_C”. Node: StartSpawnAnimation Graph: Retrieve Spawn Transform Function: Retrieve Spawn Transform Blueprint: GM_InGame
Blueprint Runtime Error: “Accessed None trying to read (real) property ActiveSpawnPad in GM_InGame_C”. Node: Return Node Graph: Retrieve Spawn Transform Function: Retrieve Spawn Transform Blueprint: GM_InGame
Blueprint Runtime Error: “Accessed None”. Node: Return Node Graph: Retrieve Spawn Transform Function: Retrieve Spawn Transform Blueprint: GM_InGame

Just gonna ping @StuButler @Justin-Mohlman to make them aware of the above (this lesson with StackOBot 5.6 in Engine 5.6.1 doesn’t work, but this lesson with StackOBot 5.4 in Engine 5.4.4 does work - not sure why not)

For fixing this do the following:

  1. Save your new level as a new map, for example “LVL_ThirdPersonCharacterCourse”

  2. Open “Edit” → “Project Settings…”

  3. Under the “Project - Maps & Modes” choose:

    • “Default GameMode” = “GameMode”
    • “Editor Startup Map” = Your saved map from the point #1.
    • “Game Default Map” = The same map from the point #1.
    • “Game Instance Class” = “GameInstance”

As it shown on the sceenshot:

1 Like

Thank you so much! I just started this tutorial today in Unreal Engine 5.7.0 and your fix worked.