Hello,
I am working on a project that uses a touch screen for input. The basic premise is a ‘scavenger hunt’ where the player moves automatically through a level, like in a rail shooter, where no direction input is required. What is required is that the player will tap on objects in the level to collect them for the scavenger hunt.
i.e. The player is traveling through a forest. There is a visible on-screen list of objects to look for. The goal is to tap on the objects in the list. A successful tap on an object ‘collects’ them for points.
I have found guides for touch input controls that act like virtual joysticks and buttons. I am hoping there is a guide of some sort for using a touchscreen to ‘tap’ and cause an interaction to occur with meshes in a level.
There are no built-in functions like Tap or Swipe in Unreal. You should implement them by yourself using generic input touch events. Or you could find already implemented solutions like Ultimate Touch Components in Blueprints - UE Marketplace
for the touch side: unreal maps touch to mouse events if you let it. enable click events and touch events under project settings, input (or call enable click events / enable touch events on the player controller at startup), and after that OnClicked fires on actors from taps, and get hit result under cursor works from touch presses too since the engine synthesizes the cursor position.
the collection loop on top of that:
on tap, trace and cast the hit actor to a collectible blueprint. the collectible adds its info to an array on the player controller (or game state for shared hunts), then hides or destroys itself. a counter widget reads that array: collected x of y, and when x equals y you show the finished screen. keep the collectibles registered from a data table (id, display name, mesh) so a new hunt location is new rows, not new logic.
one gotcha from the rail movement setup: since the camera moves, make sure the trace comes from the current player controller view point each tap, not a cached location, otherwise taps near the screen edges miss as the rail advances.
if it helps to see that loop assembled instead of building it piece by piece, the Hidden Object Game Template is a data driven hidden object game template for unreal engine 5 that runs the identical loop with mouse clicks, items defined in a data table, click to mark found, list widget, level complete flow, all commented, and the touch path above drops straight into it: Multiplayer Hidden Object Game Template | Fab
