Guys, what is the thinking? I am trying for 2 hours to create a basic HUD from scratch, no success! I have spent 2 months now in UE4 and at this point want to do a HUD, and the one thing I have is the content examples HUD: A finished building, with no step by step documentation how to built it from scratch.
Is this too much for you guys to grasp? All your examples are finished stuff! It is like showing a car mechanic a fully assembled car when he wants to learn how to assemble it.
Really, I mean you are just a small outfit and everything and probably not many people with large scale industry experience, but do you not get it into your heads, that people need stuff mouth-ready. UE4 Editor seems to be quite powerful, but what is the thinking? I mean as a very simple flow-chart, no details, just the flowchart that shows my how your minds understand it; how stuff needs to be connected! I have more than 10 years 3D software experience, coding experience, even used National Instruments Labview (another node based coder), but have never seen as strange a workflow as in the UE4 editor. What’s the idea, guys, how I am supposed to stitch stuff together. Please explain it for Dummies, for complete idiots, please! I mean I am not a complete und utter idiot, just a little bit. I have black on white that I am not stupid when I look at what I did in the past and at my qualifications. So by now, when I see that I spent two hours desperately trying to get a variable that I added to an actor blueprint on screen using a HUD, I dare blaming UE4 to 90% and my own stupidity to 10%.
Man, really, do not show fully assembled cars, saying ‘here, that’s how it is done’, when someone asks how to assemble a car.
UE4 does not have a steep learning curve! It is just that the documentation has the completely wrong approach and in addition gets outdated in parts with every update. Guys, please hire a few people who did documentations for large scale industry software! Pay them big money! You need to get this stuff out a indie town here! It the complete disaster.
Give it time! It is like learning a foreign language. At the beginning everything seems super complicated but if you insist and don’t give up you will wake up one day and everything will make sense. And you are in a much better position feature wise that the rest of us were a year ago. Now you have UMG. You just anchor it and it calculates and re sizes for the any given resolution automatically. Try doing that with the old HUD system!
When i first started out with Unreal (and mind you the old HUD ,UMG,Matinee and paper2d that i am using were a mess back then with almost no documentation) i was a bit overwhelmed like you. And do you know what the funny thing is now? That once you get the hang of it you get angry if the tutorials are super dummy friendly!! I recently watched a video tutorial that before i was pausing every 10 seconds and now i was like "stop talking and get to the point’! and i skipped 95% of the video just to reach that 5 second footage that i wanted.
Please visit Tesla Dev’s Youtube channel. It has some super sweet UMG hud tutorials that will get you started.
Cheers!
Err… Some pointers:
- There are enough examples in the learning tab of the launcher.
- Even I could butcher a HUD together in UMG, even without tutorials; and im not the smartest…
Ok. You know nothing about Epic and its history in the industry
Oh, they do… Again, the learning tab is your friend…
One of the simplest tasks at hand. See here: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?68957-How-can-i-make-a-health-system-and-bar-in-the-fps-blueprint
I had figured that out within 3 hours. Without documentation or tutorials…
By the way: 2 month with UE4 is nothing, really.
To stay within your car example, its like shouting to the instructor “Man, we are already for 2 minutesin this car and I still dont know how to drive…”
Well, actually your learning speed sets the slope :rolleyes:
And if you think that UE4 is not complex, complicated, intricate or sublimely enigmatic, … then you are just wrong 
I have more than twice the experience in that regard and I can assure you, UE4 is not learnable in just two month or a little overview sheet.
You sound more like a frustrated person who thought UE4 has a “make-cool-game-now” button and found out, it hasnt…
Just watch the tutorials
Look, apparently you are on board since UE3, so the head start for UE4 is there. Even then it took you 3 hours to figure a HUD out, something that should come so mouth ready, you should not even have to chew before swallowing. I mean every single game since the beginning of time used a HUD. It is THE most common thing in games.
It can not be, that people with decades of experience in various 3D software etc do not get their head around the ‘workflow’ in a game editor. I do not mean details, I mean the flowchart-elevator talk explaination what I need to do it. I am talking about people here who use their first game engine, not former UE3 users.
Small outfit: Epic has 100 something people according to wikipedia. That’s a small enterprise at best. I really doubt they have any guys on board who worked for large companies where documentation of customer oriented software is worlds better than the UE4 doc mess.
The advice itself: watch youtube videos.
I hope their building burns down one day because of a badly written coffee maker manual.
When you are stuck with something, always make sure to post a question into the forum -> we are always here to help + mostly you get an answer in a very short period of time.
What exactly should the HUD be abel to do?
the HUD is supposed to show a BP float variable. The BP is a ‘Shape narrow capsule’ dragged into the scene. Very basic.
I would never try to learn something from content examples, actually I have never tried to learn anything from the UE4 content example project.
There are really nice UMG tutorials on the official UE4 youtube channel. Why not just watch them? It look me like 1 or 2 days to feel really familiar with UMG, because UMG is really awesome and easy to use. I have never used UE3 or any other Engine before. But getting into UMG and building a nice UI is really not hard. It’s more about photoshop skills than about programming, the programming side is easy 
Ok, will help you in your thread 
That pretty much applied to me as well.
Most of the UE3 expierience went out of the window with Blueprints/C++ replacing UScript.
Also you can transfer the Kismet knowledge only so far…
All in all, its a complete new engine.
What is beneficial about a former UE3 exposure however is familiarity with the terminology. Like “Brush”.
But then again, there was a builder-brush in UE3, that isnt there in UE4.
The whole “InterpActor” stuff (formerly knopwn as “movers”) is gone as well in UE4.
My distinct problem, which took me most of the time, was fiddling with the ApplyValue function.
And watching a Tutorial from Epic.
I tried various ways of setting that up… So nothing elemental really.
Thats why I wrote in the post that I linked above “Many roads lead to Rome”
Content examples are an excellent way of learning, I’ve learned most of what I know by looking at completed works.
Well, to some extend agree with .
The content examples, as well as the templates, are functional, but not really polished.
For example a lot of the material setup in the starter content assets are “messy”. Unconnected nodes, not very cleaned up, etc…
So they are usefull to get a general overview.
But thats only a start. Knowing how the chess pieces move doesnt make one a good player…
And as we all know: “Knowing is half the battle!” 
I update my original question
Guys, this is so basic! Tell me, what little tick or whatever do I need to set to get it working.
Explain in layman terms what I need to do to get it working!
With documentation it is like the classic interview question: ‘How would you explain this complex technical relation to someone on the street?’
Seriously guys, turn your UE4 and/or UE4 doc to something so that someone can grasp the basic relations. You need to convert the complex thinking that has evolved in your heads during development of UE4 in to something that people can understand who were not involved. ‘Interface’ it with the rest of the world.
You completely und utterly fail with this right now. I mean you seriously fail! Not just a little bit.
There is NO learning curve in UE4. It is just that you can make the easiest things nearly impossible by simply not explaining it properly. Layman terms, do it as if your users are completely stupid and like little kids who have no clue! It is the basic mind set before writing a documentation! Please guys, I beg you, treat me as if I was stupid when explaining your engine to me! Little examples everywhere with ‘How to’ everywhere.
Epic is small. Let’s just compared to Ubisoft. Not even to real large scale business. Ubisoft has some 5000 Employees. Every title they release gets some hundred dedicated people. Their engine gets worked on by hundreds of people.
Tommy, your reply does not help me.
How do I communicate between a blueprint HUD and a narrow capsule BP to pass variables?
How do I use direct blueprint communication to pass variable values from any other blueprint (in my case a narrow capsule that is in the scene) to the HUD blueprint?
Let me rephrase:
How do I use my narrow capsule blueprint and my HUD BP with method 1 here:
https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/UserGuide/BlueprintComms/index.html
(Simple Way to Reference a Target Blueprint )
That’s how I communicate between the capsules. It does not work with HUD BPs!?
It is like I try to invent a new spaceship, jesus! If there are many many sources that show me, then why do I not get a reply that solves it.
Epic is a small house. If me and my buddy in France found a company, both of us with decades of experience in our fields, then we fit your description for Epic.
I give up 
Try Yourself, here is the challenge!
I quickly set up the basic scene: two capsules, one HUD BP, one GameMode. (2MB)
Whoever gets the TestVariableforPassing from capsule 1 displayed using the HUD BP first, gets my $30 from the marketplace transferred.
I still have those from when EPIC went free. There is nothing worth it fro me on the market place right now.
Please post screenshot of successful display and all necessary blueprint nodes and settings!
I am not getting it done using Epics’ UE4. Such a basic thing. If I attempt the same communication for capsule 1 <-> HUD as for capsule1 <-> capsule 2, I get an error.
Right now, the TestVariableforPassing is printed using capsule 2 (the rolling 999999). I want it displayed where the text is instead.
Link (only 2MB):
https://drive.google/open?id=0B_g3hVIuNxkUS2RoUGNLUVZVRUE&authuser=0
ScreenShot right after Play is pressed:
edit: I’ve not noticed that you excluded stuff that does not work so my previous words simply does not matter =]
Fixed project
://i.imgur/e2rAeRu.jpg
Hey I think you’re having a problem with finding references for objects
you can deal with this in many different ways
the easiest way for doing this is by getting the reference from the level blueprint like this
://www13.0zz0/2015/05/24/14/675219933.jpg
to add a reference to the level blueprint just make sure that that object is selected then left click while holding “R”
and that’s it just make sure to plug it in in the HUD BP
://www2.0zz0/2015/05/24/15/516024814.jpg
there are many other ways to pass references like using the get all actors of class node
hope that helped
Cheers , the Cast To was the missing link!
5347 also posted an almost identical solution actually minutes before I posted.
Will pm you guys and the market place curator to split my $30 into $15 each!
Phew, now my life can go on! I have really used almost every software on the planet during my career. Never had anything like that…
Lol, I have not noticed part about Marketplace either
If you really want to send this money in my way then check out my signature, maybe you’ll find this useful and it costs exactly 15$
you are not getting real money from me
But to summarize:
Way 1 in this documentation essentially does not work with HUD Blueprints and instead you have to cast!
https://docs.unrealengine/latest...mms/index.html
(Simple Way to Reference a Target Blueprint )
If this is true, please update the doc und write it big and bold letters as a note!
Good to hear that it’s solved now.
+1 for that