I’ve decided to start with a small simple project which would be somewhat of a clone of joust. So there’d be 2 way horizontal input and a flap button.
I’ve been exploring the samples and checking out the forums and I can’t seem to come to a conclusion as to whether I should be using a character or a pawn for the bird.
There seems to be a lot of things that come for free with a character and also tradeoffs as it’s more rigid to do things that aren’t geared towards a humanoid third person or first person free camera game.
I’m also lacking documentation on what are the basic components needed to simply have a static mesh move with a camera component and what should be parented to what in the component list.
I’d like to hear some thoughts as to how someone with more experience might evaluate this.
The examples in the BlueprintInputExamples map in the Content Examples project might help give a sense of what each option would look like. The first example is a very basic sidescroller pawn using a character component, while the second example is a spaceship that uses a manual movement setup in the event graph. The latter uses a fixed camera and only allows left/right movement, but is very limited in terms of how it can handle collision.
In think the character component might be best in this case even if you don’t need most of its features. It handles collision with obstacles and other pawns more smoothly so you don’t get caught on objects, and has a lot of useful options for things like walkable floor angle (too steep and you slide off), and how to handle slipping off ledges - all things that would take some work to set up manually in the graph. Another thing that’s useful is that it can fire events when your character lands after a jump, and if you drag off of the character movement component in the graph you can detect whether they’re walking or falling, which is handy for triggering animations and effects and so on.