I have seen very little discussion for this Unreal Learning course. Figure we should start a support thread and discuss issues we run in to?
So my first problem is a missing blueprint. I am on the final video of Hand Presence & Interaction called Building a Dart Game. I seem to have a missing blueprint BP_Dartboard. Anyone else run in to this?
Thank you for starting this thread. Iām only a few steps behind you and would love to compare notes, but Iāve been truly stumped by āIs Guardian Activeā, so I take it you succeeded?
If so, may i ask, are you not seeing this in your output log?:
Iāve been stuck on āIs Guardian Activeā for over a week, and I assume that error is the issue (though Verify Entitlement works just fine), but having rebuilt the project to this point twice and downloaded the demo, I consistently get it thrown each time, in 4.24.3, 4.25, and 4.26.1
I just realized a moment age I hadnāt signed both legal agreements in setting up my Organization for my test account, though that hasnāt yet fixed anything. But I just would love to know what your setup isā¦
Iām
Windows 10
UE4.24.3
Quest 2 w/Oculus link, Oculus app running w/ Dev mode enabled
The only possibilities I can think of are a hardware issue, or something to do with the setup of my Organization, as I think Iāve ruled out everything else. Iām at the point where I may try the Unity path to see what the equivalent of āIs Guardian Activeā is there, and see if I can isolate whether it is a UE or Oculus issue.
Oh, and I do see the BP_Dartboard blueprint in top level Dev folder of the OculusVRDartsGame projectā¦
I skipped the Guardian section actually, I am more interested in the course as a general VR dev point of view rather than specifically for Oculus.
Here is an interesting issue someone might encounter with PickUp.
In āGrabbing Objectsā, I was unable to pick up the Dart until I added both PickupActorInterface_Dart (which is in Darts/VRPawn and that I had set up earlier) in addition to PickupActorInterface (from the VirtualRealityBP/Blueprints folder) to Class Settings. Even though the Pickup Event Iām calling is definitely from the PickupActorInterface_Dart. This is unlike what is depicted in the tutorial and the setup in the OculusVRDartsGame project. I can only imagine I did something wrong in āSetting Up Our Pawnsā and may revisit later.
I actually had the exact same issue - if I remove PickupActorInterface I can no longer pick up the darts. Since we had the exact same issue I am inclined to believe this is on their end. Iām really not sure about this course.
Iām muddling through very gradually, almost at the end of āBuilding a Dart Gameā, though Iāve been waylaid by OculusLink stability issues since the software update this past weekend and am trying to fix that today.
I did manage to solve one of two related issues Iāve been having, which is the āOculus: Failed Oculus login.ā warning. This didnāt yet resolve the issue of my accessing Guardian functions, but if Iām ever going to access it, there is a way to get rid of the warning that you must first do.
You can read here:
But basically, you have to go into the Oculus Dev Dash, go to āEdit Detailsā in the App, and take a look at the API section to see if you have a UserID. If you donāt, it needs to be requested by going through to Data Use Checkup, and requesting User ID and optionally User Profile. It prompts you to make your case to Oculus when you make the request, but I think those are automatically granted once you hit submit the request because I got mine immediately and it resolved the warning message.
Anyway, that didnāt actually fix my ability to access Guardian, but Iām going to mention it to the instructor regardless.
Another significant complication in this course will be encountered in the āCommunicating Between UMG and Blueprintsā section, due to the fact the Darts Assets imported from Epic already have UI coding that the course instructs the user to do, so this section involves out of sequence steps and some debugging.
Creating certain variables (āButton Actionā and āValueā) and custom events (āUI_CoreButtonPressedā) at the outset that already exist in W_CoreButton will not be possible, and will crash Unreal if you donāt realize what is happening. The key tell is an alert message in opening W_CoreButton that "following member variables in blueprint /ā¦/ have invalid type. Would you like to remove them?, and a number of compiler errors already in the provided asset.
Anyway, to get your bearings, look in the DartsAssets project youāll have imported from, and be aware that there is functional code in there that the tutorial presumes doesnāt exist, and this makes life difficult. Iām still needing to take a few steps back to work around it, as there are a number of compiler errors that can follow on from this if you donāt take stock at the outset.
Thanks for posting these, ooghe. Do you think these errors might be unique to your project? I wonder if anyone else has had the same problems.
Do you recommend continuing with the course?
Hi Slim- sorry for not seeing this sooner
So I did manage to make it through the ā**Implement UI with Unreal Motion Graphicsā **section as of Monday, so yes it took me awhile and yes it was a pain. But Iām soldiering on so farā¦
The best technique for what I posted above is to have the clean copy of the downloadable OculusDartsVR project on hand (I run an instance while Iām working on my Darts project) for reference, and do not hesitate to remove any imported code creating compile errors (I mean literally, just remove any code like what I posted there that youāll be rebuilding anyway), and just methodically go through the lessons and youāll get through it. There are at least two bugs you might discover in the code youāve imported that do not cause compilation errors but still affect functionality, in one case I think an EButton Action variable was miscategorized as something other than EButton Action, and later in the Determine Quadrant function used for creating Bonuses, thereās an exec that still needs to be hooked up. I mean, in some ways itās not the worst thing to practice some bug hunting, mind you, this is the first time Iāve used Blueprints so it really is putting me through my paces in an ultimately beneficial way.
Right now Iām on the section about the PSO Cache System, which is about creating a reserve of the most critical shaders. But my current challenge is that this minor task is now becoming my introduction to ācookingā, which does not succeed due to:
This is apparently a pretty common error, but really raises what I hoped was the out-of-scope topic of Android, learning what practices are and are not kept from 4.24 vs 4.26, what needs to happen with Android SDK, NDKs, and so on.
Looming over this is my lack of clarity over whether the fact that Iām using a Quest 2 complicates completing this course. I take it cooking happens differently for 4.26 than 4.24, and I installed Android.bat from the Extras folder in 4.26 and tried and failed (which was a bit demoralizing) at this mini-tutorial from December:
Sooooā¦ Iām still assuming what Iām fundamentally doing is using a Quest 2 to build a Rift app, and this should be fine even if the course was created almost a year ago. But Iām just a little leery of trying to line up my cooking learning with something created prior to Quest 2 being out.
FYI, quick update on this.
I am still continuing with this, and made it through PSO Caching, and have many notes of what it took to get there.
Currently Iām on the section about converting the project to C++ which, unlike the tutorial, generates many errors for me for some reason Iāll be debugging this week.
I am hoping to, if I can get through it, post my notes on areas in each section where additional information would have helped, and what has changed since the tutorial was posted.
Please do keep us posted on your progress and your notes for help.
Happy to!
I did finish the course and I highly recommend it despite the hiccups.
That said, it wasnāt simple, and my decision to try and go a Quest 2/App Lab route that did not exist when the course was created added some complexity to getting through this. Not the courseās fault of course, all of this is hitting a moving target, but maybe someone will read this and there can be an update for Quest 2/App Lab considerations.
In the end, I was able to get a functional and 72fps performant version to Rift, and a Quest version to App Lab that, while not performant (50fps), is proof of concept.
I was able to do the project in 4.26.2 and also I downloaded the 4.24 OculusVRDartsGame project from Epic (as well as DartsAssets), which I had side by side with my own Darts project in a second instance. I wouldnāt have been able to complete this otherwise.
Here are my notes (repeating some stuff from above) in one place broken out by section. I hope this is helpful to people beginning with that course, and again, Iām really new to this and none of this is āofficialā.
These two sections were fine, but if you do make it through the course I recommend coming back to Rendering Materials and VR Considerations once you start looking into analyzing performance
This is where I first ran into the Guardian issues, where I wasnāt able to see the Guardian Debug View and was getting the āWarning: Oculus: Failed Oculus loginā message. The latter turned out to be because I had not done the Data Use Checkup.
Once I resolved that issue, I still wasnāt able to see the Guardian Debug View, and was not able to confirm āIs Guardian Configuredā. Only much later in the tutorial (PSO Cache System), when I learned how to launch the app to my headset, did I see the Debug View (when in Dev build). So it works, it just wonāt work from running it through VR Preview AFAIK.
Another thing to mention on the subject of Entitlement and AppID, is that if you are like me you were eager to build this as a Quest App Lab instead of Rift in order to be able to be able to share it to someone someday. This added challenges, but I succeeded (though, as I said, it is not performant). Do not necessarily treat this DefaultEngine.ini step as best practice for reasons that Iāll go more into later:
I made two Apps, one Rift and one Quest, so that I could edit the DefaultEngine.ini and AndroidEndgine.ini as quickly as needed for A/B testing whenever I got errors.
In the end, my final DefaultEngine.ini looks like:
[OnlineSubsystem]
DefaultPlatformService=Oculus
[OnlineSubsystemOculus]
bEnabled=true
OculusAppId=[my Quest App ID]
RiftAppId=[My Rift App ID]
The reason they were not both the same ID is because of an error message I got much later in the tutorial, when I was using the Oculus Platform Tool.
I added āOculus VR Assets Onlyā directly to my Darts project from Epic Store, but was worried when I was not seeing everything I saw in the Darts project the instructor was working from. So when he referred to something I didnāt have (like the C2 Lobby), I would migrate it from the OculusVRDartsGame project without overwriting anything.
This worked out ok, but I saw compilation errors that would alarm any newbie like myself, but should this happen to you, donāt worry, it doesnāt affect anything in this section. I think it entirely UMG stuff addressed in the next section.
The most challenging thing to debug in this section was in āGrabbing Objectsā, where, as opposed to in the OculusVRDartsGame project, I needed to add both the PickUp Actor and Pickup Actor Darts Interface to the BP_Darts class setting. I still have no idea why this must be done differently than in OculusVRDartsGame.
Here is where the compilation errors I got when I imported assets come more into play.
For these, I just located and ruthlessly stripped out any blueprint logic that generated errors because they are going to explain how to build everything.
I also feel like there were often, if not bugs, incomplete blueprints in both the OculusVRDartsGame/Darts Assets that were usually as simple as fixing some missing connection, a wrong datatype, or various references in dropdown slots. Almost(!) as if they wanted you to actually go through and understand the logic (or maybe these were somehow migration errors).
An example of this type of thing was in the Determine Quadrant function of BP_Dartboard, where my version the connection to āSetā from Determine Quadrant of Hit was just not there, and I needed to set it myself even though it was not mentioned in the course.
Another example of this was when the tutorial had me create this (which did not work):
While both the OculusVRDartsGame and the provided Darts Assets Only has this (which did work):
So yes, I need to revisit the missing Bonuses functionality, but as I am just learning Blueprints, it was a little weird that OculusVRDartsGame doesnāt actually demonstrate it working.
One thing I learned when creating the UI_CoreButtonPressed function in BPP_Pawn_Darts is to make sure the āButton Actionā and āVariableā variables created here are of the same data type as the similarly named Enumeration in Dev. I think I was unable to create the variables the tutorial wanted because I was naming them the name of existing variables, and had not yet set the data type, and this led to some issues.
This section was fine until I got to PSO Cache System, and, again, being very new to this, I did not even know the Quest 2 is Android OS (which I have never worked with before) so I spent a lot of time learning about Android and Launching to Quest.
In addition to what was in the course, this particular videowas very helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tzrsEm6V9Q
then this boilerplate project helped me as proof of concept that I could get something onto the Quest 2:
[FREE]Oculus Quest Starter - a boilerplate project with environment setup tutorial
Additional learnings:
I watched these, but I think this is more for general knowledge. I donāt think there is any audio in the Darts game.
This section was straightforward until it got to the āBlueprint to C++ā section.
Most importantly, when they have you import the Dart.Build.cs file, you will need to make a minor edit to it if you are using UE 4.26.2 and replace āLibOVRAvatarā with āOculusOpenXRLoaderā, which has been renamed since 4.24, otherwise, the build will fail.
Using VisualStudio2019 is fine for this, I had never used it before, but I learned to ignore the many thousands of Intellisense errors, and only pay attention to Build Errors. I believe that one adjustment fixed every one of the 25 Build errors I got, but if anyone experiences issues beyond that, it may be that I had also needed to explicitly tell Darts.sln where the plugins were.
In the āDestinations and Rich Presenceā Section, Iām not sure this is still current with the Quest App Lab era. Grouping does not seem work as it did when the tutorial was made, and I have had no luck with Grouping my Quest and Rift apps together, so Iām not sure if any of that is still possible, though I do see my Leaderboard stats are working and that the new C++ class I added works.
My Destination that I had added in this section is perpetually held at āPending Reviewā, so I do not know whether this is testable.
The next big learning was 7 minutes in to āDestinations and Rich Presenceā, when we are instructed to āpackage the build and upload it into our Alpha channelā, simple words that took much time to research, understand, and complete, and it might have been nice to have a few more resources included here.
But in fairness, much of this was because I wanted to build for Quest 2 App Lab. To be clear, Rift wants an .exe and Quest wants an .apk, which is mostly why this got hard.
As I mention in my other thread that I linked to above, the OCStarter project is again very helpful in showing me the Package Settings to export for Quest.
[FREE]Oculus Quest Starter - a boilerplate project with environment setup tutorial
I also think I watched this, from about 15 minutes in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SY2Za6j7UY
You will also want to understand what an Android Manifest is, which is controllable through Unrealās Advanced APK packaging section.
And add the following Extra Tag to your package settings:
Adding this application tag that sets allowBackup to false is a security measure that Oculus will want in a Security check, and I think may even be necessary to upload.
Also, Oculus now prefers an arm64 package as opposed to armv7, and to generate an arm64 build from Unreal you will need to enable the Online Subsystem GooglePlay plugin.
You will also need to learn about how to sign an APK for distribution, so watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-GSBX4ZdgCA
and I also recommend watching this as an orientation for what App Lab is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tj412PFUJiY
So when I built my Darts package (Shipping, for ATSC), I generated dozens if not hundreds of errors in my output log.
And here were the debugging steps I had to take to get this project packagable:
Finally, once I had an apk build that was good (and this took many tries), I needed to learn about the OculusVR plugin that is accessible from Project Settings, in order to upload this to my Oculus Dev Dashboard.
Mostly the Oculus Platform Launch Window functionality is what matters, which is what allows you to upload to the Alpha Channel. This is a simpler way to do what is described here:
https://developer.oculus.com/distribute/publish-reference-platform-command-line-utility/?device=RIFT#access-token
And worked easily for Rift and less easily for Quest. This gets in to what I mentioned at the beginning, about my Entitlement settings probably not being best practice, where one was a Rift ID and one was a Quest ID. I feel like I was unable to upload this without having at least one valid Rift AppID regardless of whether my Target Platform was Quest or not. I would get an error that there was no valid App ID, which was really weird and I should retest this.
But I did get it onto the Alpha Channel for both Rift and Quest, and so I was able to be done with this section.
I watched these, but do not yet have a 5ghz router, so Iāll come back to that.
This section is all still valid, and all these tools work as described. The one exception is Android Systrace, which did not work for me, but there is a now a tool called Perfetto that does. I was able to get this to work, but have not actually used it yet.
https://developer.oculus.com/blog/how-to-run-a-perfetto-trace-on-oculus-quest-or-quest-2/
This also helped me understand that a bit more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kNhB_z704I
All of this section was clear. So far, I have focused more on learning RenderDoc, which, in tandem with the OVR Metrics tool, seems to be a little easier for me to start with. In addition to what is covered in the course, I also found these helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoqfzk-lQgY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5b32PPvlwY&t=494s
I also felt this link on Android Vulkan would be good to anyone creating for Quest 2 App Lab at this point, as I gather this is pretty necessary for understanding how GPU profiling would work for this.
Much of it was beyond me, but Android Vulkan must be enabled in APK package settings.
This was all pretty straightforward too, and explained Quest performance targets and Draw Calls and why I donāt think this Darts game could easily become a Quest 2 app.
So, for now, Iām satisfied that I was able to get my 50fps version of Darts onto my Beta and send invitations to a friend. I also downloaded the OculusAppStore.psd so that I can place the correct imagery for the app when I get a chance.
Iāve now moved onto my own 3d environment. I think that, in addition to draw calls, the main performance issue with Darts may have been the complex lighting setup and maybe the translucent railing glass which I take it is very expensive on Quest2, but Iām very curious about that.
Iāve seen this video on high performance VR glass, which is allegedly the best possible approach to glass for Unreal to Quest, but I have so far been unable to achieve anything close to that through dithering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJwHjIQs2fY
A final note, when I successfully uploaded my APK to the Alpha Channel, Oculus Developer Dash will do security tests on the build.
I donāt know how necessary it is to address those for App Lab, but I looked into the āEnable Android NSCā vulnerability and was curious about creating a ānetwork_security_config.xmlā and found these two threads
Network Security Configuration File
Android: how to add an xml file to res/xml - Mobile - Epic Developer Community Forums
So if anyone has any insight on if this fix is easy for a non- C++ programmer, Iād be curious. The second OpenSSL issue I havenāt looked into, but suspect one would need to get an SSL license to address that.
Anyway, I feel like I know a lot more about Quest 2 than when I started the course and it is was very very helpful, and I thank those who created it!
Your OpenSSL is out dated is all. It gets updated often and yours is simply one of the old vulnerable versions.
Hey thanks for the notes @ooghe, these are great. I am thinking of possibly giving it a second shot!
thanks for the Tips,
I did encounter a problem as well in the adding hands iteractions, i was wondering if anyone had trouble in triggering the stop darts, when hits other actors? and how to solve it?
I do think I remember this, this being an example of one of those minor bugs that seemed almost designed so as not to make it too easy. I was in a situation where multiple darts were accruing and jittering all over the floor as I threw and missed, never disappearing. I think that within the Dart, there was a function for a time limit after throw (or hit) not ticked, or something very simple like that, that you could see was different than in the working versionā¦
Hey @ooghe, did you mention before you got the project converted to C++ from Blueprints?
Would you be interested in posting the cpp files to Github? I would love to take a look at the code for this course without going through all 16 hrs of video and converting myself lol.
Just getting back from vacation and seeing thisā¦
I still need to learn how to upload to Github, and when I do Iāll update (I have a few things to get through first). But in the meantime, you can probably just download the working 4.24 Darts version from the Epic Vault and that will already have the Darts.sln they have you create, as well as the new Oculus.cpp class they take you through adding. Mind you, this only works correctly in 4.24.
What threw me was having to revise the Darts.Build.cs otehr than what the tutorial says to do, because they renamed the OculusOpenXRLoader to LibOVRAvatar in later releases. You can see on the left is what they give you, and on right is what works for 4.25+ But really, I think that was the only difference from the Demo version.
I had the same issue and thanks to you i was able to resolve it.
