Help me understand Blueprints

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hello. I’ve been looking for a resource to help me do this, but so far, All i’ve known is that there’s not really anything that tell you HOW a blueprint works, and what each individual thing does in general, or the common function types of a blueprint.
As such, though I’ve copied several blueprints via videos (like a few in the one RTS blueprint tutorial vid that’s like… 2 hours long), I have no more of an idea of what Blueprints actually do.

What’ I’m looking for… is a Picture of the puzzle itself. I slightly understand that Blueprints, like a puzzle, have different shapes of piece that fit together only in certain ways with other pieces.
But I have no real way to know the shape of said piece without being told the shape. I have no way to even see the picture of said puzzle piece, so I can figure out what is needed where.

I can follow video after video, and tutorial after tutorial and read ALL the documentations on blueprints… but the sad thing is…

I won’t UNDERSTAND it.

I want to understand it like I understand English, so i can make my own iterations, with at least SOME measure of how pieces work in tandem with one another, or if they can even fit together.

As far as I know, there’s just about nothing on Understanding a blueprint construction. There’s only videos on “how to make this thing” pretty much. It’s frustrating.

Me? I’m a complete freaking idiot when it comes to learning other languages, and this is essentially only easier in that it has a more visual approach.
I don’t know which functions work together, I don’t know which ones don’t, I don’t even know what each thing individually does, or even the lingo I’d need to begin to understand.

With me, I need to learn the shapes of the pieces, and the tiny part of the picture that they contain so I can really make anything or BEGIN to experiment, or fix a blueprint that I made by following a tutorial which successfully did make it, which for me, i couldn’t progress since a certain function didn’t appear to exist for a LONG time.

Experimentation and trying it out for myself is fine… but how can you experiment with chemicals if you don’t know the chemicals, or even the procedure of experimenting to begin with? What if you don’t even have arms, and are just a floating torso?

That’s me. I ask of you guys and gals… Help me grow limbs. Are there any resources on Blueprints that breaks EVERYTHING down, or atleast tells me the basic rules of blueprint construction, rather than just guiding you to make a thing?

I’m tired of being TOLD how to do a thing. I want to be TAUGHT how to do a thing on my own.

Note: I’m honestly a bit frustrated, since I’ve kinda given up on a second tutorial due to blueprints not being completeable in the way that is presented in the tutorial. Ofcourse, I couldn’t find a way to make it work, since… well… an engineer knows how to make a design work, because they know the rules of how the design’s parts work to begin with. I have literally 0 useful info on how Blueprints work. I don’t know the tools, the rules, or the parts. I am effectively a Level 0 noob at them. I couldn’t make said blueprints work because I don’t know how to do so. There’s no real rhyme or reason in the editor, as to which functions will only work with a dragged pin, as I’ve tried to do that, and sometimes, the pin I drag, will bring up functions that just don’t work with it at all.

Another Note: Please don’t bother saying something like “blueprints are easy tho” because they’re not. Imagining learning french when you know only Russian, without a guidebook, translator, or even a friend who knows French. You’re just by yourself, reading french on a page, with no context as to which words mean what. Identically as difficult for me to learn Blueprints.

So please help me guys. I don’t mean to sound impatient, or rude. I just need help with this. Is there Anything that can help me?

1 Like
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Pretty much all of us learned from tutorials. Once you learn how to do a few things the overall idea behind how the different types of blueprints are constructed becomes more and more clear. Then from there you can begin to do whatever you like with them, but that takes time to get to that point.

Im not sure if I understand you completely but I would not expect to watch a single video (or even a single series of videos) that will make you proficient, that comes with time and experience of doing many tutorials and learning.

Also, when you do have specific questions about how to do something, this forum is a really good resource!

EDIT
Another thing to note is don’t just copy things from videos, try to modify them a bit so you can begin to learn how to do things on your own!

EDIT 2
Here is a list of (most of) the nodes. This way you at least can look them up and know what the “puzzle pieces” are and what you can do.

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First of all, do you know any programming language at all? Because blueprint scripting is just that, programming. It’s confined to Unreal Engine 4 and its environment, but it is still essentially programming.
If you don’t know how to code then blueprints may be a bit overwhelming. You might want to start learning a procedural programming language first. The basic concepts among programming languages are usually pretty much the same, as long as you stick to the same category (e.g. don’t expect a functional language to work like a procedural language).

I know this might not be what you want. But everybody starts somewhere, and most often people’s goals are way too big. The most prominent example is the coder newbie who has barely written any code but the first program he wants to make is a full fledged 3D AAA MMORPG. That’s just not possible. So take your time, learn the basics, understand them, and you’ll be golden. There’s an abundance of tutorials and books out there teaching programming. Since you’re working with UE4 anyway I would say try and learn C++, but it’s a tough language if you haven’t programmed before.

If you however have a general knowledge in the field of programming, you might want to clarify or be more specific on what your problems are. Tell us what you try to do and explain where you fail to progress and what’s stopping you. Apart from the basic concepts programming is just years and years of experience.

Finally, as an example, if I were to say try to create a blueprint that has a static mesh and moves up 100 unreal units per second, would you be able to do that? If not, which part of this task gives you trouble?

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Thats exactly what how i feel too.
I’m very frustrated because of the fact that i doesn’t seem to understand how to connect Blueprintnodes so that they work.

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You have to start somewhere. Since you don’t want to learn by studying examples, your next best bet would be to learn about Blueprints in general. This is the Unreal page that would start that process:

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Blueprints: (The short version):

Red nodes(a starting point in the blueprint, can be called from other blueprints and within the same blueprint)
Gray/white arrows(on the blueprints, The arrow on the left side of the blueprint(the in arrow, pointing into the blueprint node) is the start of the blueprint node, the right arrow(the one pointing out of the blueprint node) is the exit pointing to the next blueprint node to execute.)
The gray/white lines between the blueprints(this this the flow of the blueprint… it flows from the exit of one node to the start of an other node.)
Any other colored line is data flow(it is where the data that the blueprint node with the gray/white arrows need. )

There is no end nodes, you can just end the node flow anytime you want, as long as it ends on the exit point of a node.
Note: any non-connected nodes will not execute. Red nodes will, but they do nothing when not connected to other nodes.

Functions are just a easy way to make a thing that you need to do many times in the blueprint and/or just to make the blueprint easier to read by splitting it up into pices.
The Construction Script that the Actor blueprint class comes with is an example of a function, this function is run when the Actor is created in the world.
You don’t have to have functions to make a game in UE4, you can use Custom Nodes instead, but the Custom Nodes are a little bit different, they are on the main blueprint page and have the same variable list as all the other things on the main blueprint page. Functions have their own variables that only exist in the fuction, and saves some memory.

Play around with the simple game examples that comes with the engine, you can delete and make new projects anytime the example gets messy.

I hope i didn’t ramble too much.
I hope this helps… :slight_smile:

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Thanks guys, Fuchs actually put it fairly well. the ONLY experience I have in coding is very basic 0th level Javascript (I have a code academy account ,and I stopped when I couldn’t progress due to a problem I couldn’t figure out).
I personally just want somewhere to start ultimately. Even if it’s to learn C++ I don’t care, I’ll do it, just so long as it feels like I’m learning something, I’m fine if it takes me 5 years to barely get somewhere.

I honestly wrote that when I was rather frustrated like how I said. I’ll do some playing around, thanks for the link to the whole “most nodes” page. It’s really helpful honestly.

Ultimately, it’s just Overwhelming to me. my only problem is that I don’t know exactly where to start, no matter how low-scale it is. Even if it’s just sticking to a “if you can’t mod UT, don’t game dev in UE4 yet” which might be a decent idea actually.

Also by Blueprints, I meant nodes, not functions. I’m most familiar with Starcraft Broodwar’s trigger system as far as any kind of very vaguely programming-like things go, and like… I’ve honestly forgotten the info I have atm on Javascript, so I don’t know any actual programming stuffs anymore. xD

Thanks for the help everyone, it does help honestly. It’s reassuring that people are willing to help, makes it feel less like trying to walk through waist-high quicksand.

Also I know I can make a new project xD I have like… 19 of them. Each from when I regain the incredible motivation I have (but often lose due to hitting my head against the wrong wall, but not knowing which wall to hit aswell) to learn the engine… but they’re all blank, content-less projects. xD

Again, thanks for the links, info and recommendations. :slight_smile:

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You can’t program code in any language without the basics of programming in mind;
Blueprints are visual, but still a programming language. You need to understand what ints, floats, vectors, functions, enums, structs, etc are. While you can’t fully understand those basics and while you don’t understand how a computer’s CPU works, you won’t be able to be self-sufficient in programming and will always need someone telling you what to do and how to do it.

A quick google search for “programming principles” took me to a bunch of pdfs, like these:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/free-ebooks-software-developers/

Even though Blueprints are ‘blocks’, when you learn the base of programming you’ll understand what these blocks are doing under the hood even before you drop them into the graph.

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Yep definitely recommend go and try and learn some programming if you are failing to grasp blueprints. All blueprints are is lines of code, just converted to a flowchart format instead of text on a page.

You might need to do dozens upon dozens of tutorial videos and lessons to learn what everything does, I have been using Unreal 4 since it became available and every project I do I learn new things to do with blueprints. I am not sure how long you have been working in the engine but programming with anything does take a lot of time to get used to and understand. Programming is a complicated thing to grasp, it’s just something you are going to have to come to terms with really.