Hi !
Just as the title says, I don’t know where to start learning UE4 programming.
I have good experience with C# as I used Unity before.
My problem with C++ is that it isn’t as simple as C#.
But, after following some C++ tutorials, I discovered that my problem isn’t with C++, it’s with UE4 itself !
UE4’s programming tutorials are outdated and/or the tutor just copies and pastes the code without explaining it !
Any ideas ?
Thanks in Advance
I’m just starting out as well, but I have a strong background with C++, as not only did I focus on this language when I was teaching myself to code, but the language is emphasized in my degree program. I bought a big Dummies book on the language and read it during many of my general courses in community college.
The API has helped me immensely but it’s pretty necessary to have a decent understanding of Unreal’s structure / editor before it’ll help you, and honestly I would really suggest getting to know C++ before mixing it with Unreal. Learning both at once isn’t advisable. This is because game engines (at least both Source and UE4) tend to use every language feature in the book to accomplish what they need. Not knowing how those features work is going to make it really difficult for you.
Unreal doesn’t seem particularly hard, it’s just new and unfamiliar and there is a bit of an information gap since so much of Epic’s tutorials focus on Blueprints exclusively. That being said the way things are done in Blueprints are similar. So there’s that.
I don’t have a straight answer for you, try-fail-ask, try-fail-ask, etc. I’ve learned a hell of a lot this way. Sure it’s not fun, but it works and eventually the frequency of the try-fail-ask cycle tends to slow as it all starts to make sense.
Bug me on Skype if you want to chat, seeing as we’re both newcomers.
I started looking into ue4 a month ago.
The way I have made things work is google->old posts->fix outdated code.
The API, VisualStudio or anything has little to none helpful information.
Most of the time I need to guess what the function needs or does based only on the name.
Other times you find things like, instead of vector.lenght or magnitude they use vector.size which should mean dimension.
It took me literally a day to figure out how to spawn a sphere.
I had been at it since yesterday.
Sounds retarded but meanwhile I had no trouble coding this:
The learning curve is hard.
Not long ago I didn’t get why new people were almost allergic to coding and always wanted visual bricks instead, in a python based game engine.
I believe that without prior coding experience, learning ue4 c++ would have been a catastrophe.
I’m going to post your message here (hope you don’t mind) as well as my response, just so that others can read it.
Hi !
You said that the API has helped you but I had to have an understanding of Unreal structure. How can I understand it ?
I have some basic knowledge of C++.
Also, in your signature, you say that you are a programmer, an animator and a digital artist. Did you start as an artist or a programmer ?
Hey Adham,
I’m , nice to meet you. When I started looking at UE4, just at the beginning of this summer before my summer college courses started, I had messed with enough game engines (Source, Unity, etc) to know that it would benefit me to watch others first. Even if what they were doing seemed trivial or not what I wanted to do. So I started watching the tutorials on Epic’s YouTube channel.
I don’t claim to be any kind of expert, I in fact still have no idea what I’m doing but I feel like some of those guides and tutorials showed me how the engine works in a few key ways. It’s building intuition about how things work. I can’t put it into words.
Regarding C++, that’s good but you are going to want to understand how public/private/protected works with class inheritance at least. It’ll also help to understand const/static/virtual/abstract/override and how preprocessor macros work as well.
I started as neither an artist nor a programmer, I started as a bored lonely 10 year old playing Runescape 1 on a dial up Internet connection, thinking that the virtual world could be better than it currently was. I then dabbled in Java, HTML, CSS, PHP, later Photoshop and 3ds max, eventually getting some paid animation work which almost put me in an insanely expensive art college. Luckily it didn’t and I’m now a junior level computer science student at CU Denver. I’ve since focused on C/C++ and 3D modeling / rendering. I’m particularly interested in studying real time graphics, with an emphasis on OpenGL.
I hope to recreate one of my favorite childhood games, a little Sega Dreamcast game called Toy Commander, obviously with the better part of a decades of improvements I’ve carefully considered.