Hi everyone! Lead engine programmer James Golding has put together a new set of really nice Blueprint tutorial videos for you today. Check them out and let us know what you think!
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Now that UE4 has been out for a few weeks, it seemed a good time to do another round of quick Blueprint tutorials! I want to try and address some common difficulties, and introduce a couple of handy features. Let’s go!
Adding Interaction
Once you have a player moving around, you often want them to “reach out and touch something.” Giving the player to power to interact can be done in a few ways – this video shows how to do a trace to see what is in front of you, and then either Cast it to a particular type and manipulate it, or use a ‘Blueprint Interface’, which allows simple interaction with lots of kinds of objects.
Once you start building interesting Blueprints, the next step is often to get them to team up and work together. There are several ways that instances of Class Blueprints can know about each other; this video shows two – explicitly telling one about the other, and using the ‘Find All Actors Of Class’ node.
This is a feature that our designers have found really powerful, and used for all kinds of madness! It lets you visualize a Vector or Transform variable as a little blue diamond in the level, which you can manipulate using the regular transform controls, and use as part of your Construction Script.
When you use random numbers to create procedural content in a Construction Script, one annoyance you quickly run into is that things are different every time. But there is a solution – RandomStreams! These give you a random but repeatable sequence of values, and this video shows how to use them.
How about some Movement by force examples… I"M struggling trying to get a ball to move with force. I notice a few others are attempting it also. that would be a good one.
Thanks for these demos. I have a question about the “Using 3d Widgets” video:
I followed your steps in the video, but when I try to move the 3d widget in the editor, it “jumps” all over the place. This is in the default 3rd-person blueprint-based scene, with no changes to any settings. I can try to capture a video of it tomorrow if this isn’t a known thing.
Upon further testing I think it’s because without the dummy component, setting the scale of the mesh also changes the scale of the blueprint which affects the TopPoint vector, which changes the scale of the blueprint, which affects the TopPoint vector, etc etc. It is a ‘feedback’ problem that gives unwanted behavior.
Mine does this too. The behavior is correct (it properly scales the cube), but moving around the 3D widget TopPoint results in very strange jumpy behavior, even with snapping disabled.
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