Responding to action mappings in other actors?

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

I have an actor that I’ve created in C++ and it gets spawned into the world at runtime. This actor is like a “manager” of sorts over a particular game system, so it is never possessed or directly controlled in any way by the player. However, I would like it to be able to respond to action mappings like the player can. For example, I have an action mapping linked to the shift key. When it is pressed I’d like the manager actor to do something.

The obvious solution would be to create a BlueprintCallable function on the manager actor in C++ and then have the player controller call this function when the key for the action mapping is pressed. However, I’m wondering if it is possible to bypass the player controller and have the manager actor listen directly for that particular action mapping?

2

Any Actor can have an InputComponent. A quick way to get this to work might be AActor::EnableInput/DisableInput. After the first call to YourManager->EnableInput() you should be able to access its InputComponent and bind actions:
YourManager->InputComponent->BindAction(…);