I am new to Unreal and I have an issuse with my lauchpad animation in my project. I got it to go up and down like I wanted, but if you jump on it multiple times, the pad start to move into the air and stay there. What is the process of debuging this type of issue when the code is working?
Thanks in advance.
Don’t add timeline values to anything, in most cases the result will be inconsistent.
The best way and the most intuitive in my opinion is to have a float curve in the timeline that goes from 0 to 1, and use it as Alpha for Lerp, to interpolate between values, be that floats or vectors or anything. This way you’ll always know what the initial value and the target values are, and the result will always be the same.
I’m new to Blueprint and I’m trying to learn, this example came from the documentation. I want to get better and need a soild understanding how to write BP in away I can understand what I should do and when. Also could you provide some code examples, it would be greatly appreciated.
Are you saying there is a documentation example where they suggest a Timeline + Set Actor Location as a means to create a character launchpad?
Yes, in the launchpad documentation it had a link for timeline nodes to add animation to the launchpad. It’s in the further learning part of the tutorial.
If we’re learning how to make a lauchpad for characters, perhaps you could try this:
You could drop those pad actors in the world, adjust the arrow direction and the power variable. Seems like a more natural way to me.
@ClockworkOcean Much appreciated I’ll give it a go. How would I go about adding animation to make sure that it’s telegraphed that it’s been activated? if you wanna find me I’m usually hanging out in unreal slackers discord.
I think you mean @Everynone ? 
That would depend on the kind of animation you need. How are you envisioning it? Particles shoot out as in the original examples? In which case you accidently summoned the correct Niagara Dabbling Wizard @ClockworkOcean
@ClockworkOcean There were three ways I was thinking of approaching this. by doing an animation when you’re launched in the air moving the pad to make it look like it pushed you upward or changing the color of the pad or maybe using an emitter to make a ring around the pad as well, like in the bouncy ball animation in one of the epic presentation demos.
Oh I see, that’s what the Timeline was for! I misread that as character movement, my bad! That’s a decent idea but Timelines can be quite rigid. It’s worth knowing how they work, indispensable.
changing the color of the pad
You’re looking for a Dynamic Material Instance then.
using an emitter to make a ring around the pad as well
That’s the job for an emitter, indeed.
My suggestion is to tackle one at a time.
Don’t use physical movement to launch character, it also will be really inconsistent, + characters tend to stick to surfaces they stand on, even if they move fast.
Make a separate moving platform with no pawn collision, and LaunchCharacter with a node.
Now that you said that, I think I understand what OP really wanted. It’s supposed to be like a piston ejecting the char in a direction. I think launching during a timeline could work. Somehow I feel this would be fiddly to set up.
Yes, it can work, physically move the character by the platform and launch it at the very top, but with different launch velocities it would be a finicky setup; to match speed with the launch velocity, + if you want to launch really hard, the movement will be really fast, and the platform might go through the character instead of moving it.
Anyway, if there is no particular design reason why it should physically move the character, I’d stick with a unified short animation and ignoring the Pawn channel. I have launchpads in my game and I tried a lot of different setups; this is the most robust and scalable in my opinion.
