Hi all,
I’m new to UE4 and I’m trying to start making a top-down LTTP style game in paper2d. I’ve stepped through much of the Tanks vs Zombies tutorial, which was great, but… there’s a lot that made sense as I watched it, but when I tried to do stuff on my own I realized that I didn’t know a lot of important details, like what AttachTo actually does, why we keep using CreateDefaultSubobject, why Visual Studio says CreateDefaultSubobject is undefined but still compiles, why making a new PaperCharacter C++ class gives you basically just the line “GENERATED_BODY()”, etc. etc… (these are just examples; I googled a lot and found out much of what I was looking for, when I knew the name of what I was looking for, but I still feel like I have a ton of function calls to discover and learn)
Blueprints look easy to use, and there are a ton of tutorials out there for them, but I hear they are slightly slower than C++, and I intend for my game to eventually involve some pretty complicated calculations that I can’t imagine would make for very easy-to-read flowchart style graphs. I want to stick to C++ as much as possible, because it’s what I’m used to (but UE4 C++ seems like something a little different from what I’m used to). I know that I can explore the engine source to figure a lot of this out, and I understand C++ well enough that I feel confident doing that, but that seems like a lot of work to do prior to accomplishing anything, and I don’t want to commit to it unless I’m sure that it’s what I have to do.
So in my quest to avoid unnecessary work, I came up with a hopeful, but very unlikely scenario. Do blueprints generate human readable source code that I can go look at? If not, then do blueprint graphs translate easily to C++ function calls, so that I can make some blueprint stuff and then use that to learn UE4 C++?
Most of the tutorials I’ve found for UE4 C++ seem geared towards people who are absolute beginners, and I feel like there’s a gap between the tutorial content and actually making original content. How do I bridge the gap? A lot of people online seem to be saying, “just dive in!”. But what does that mean, and what kind of time frame should I block out for the “diving in” process?
Thanks a bunch, everybody!