Training Stream - Blueprint Communications with - February 23rd

[originalbadboy]

@;481256

This depends. For the most part references come in as Actors. Consider the ActorBeginOverlap event. Its output is of type Actor. This will give you access to the object’s transform data and a few other useful things, but nothing specific to that class.

Now, you can create your own reference of a given type and if you do that, then you don’t need to cast. In fact, if you do, Unreal will warn you that the cast will always test true. But if you’re using many of the events and functions available in the engine, you’re getting very references, which we have to do for flexibility.

Consider it like this:

In most cases, a reference is kinda like someone randomly knocking at your door. It might be a friend, but you’ll need to verify before you take action. So you might look through the peephole or ask who it is before you do anything. If you know the person, you might open the door. References in BP are more often than not going to be the same way. They’ll come in as something very like an Actor (or a knock at the door) and you’ll need to verify it is what you think it is (the pizza guy) before responding.

Does that help?

So in essence what you are saying is that if you are referencing a BP directly you might not be getting the information you think you are getting? Whereas if you cast then you know your casting to a certain type, therefore its safer, even though both obliviously work?

That leads me onto another question (apologies if already answered in stream), again if you are referencing another objects variables, is it therefore safer to do a get/set (from a get/set function in the BP) than just accessing the variables directly? Get/Set is generally how you are supposed to it, or is BP’s just making us lazy?