Our studios goal this week is to get the hud started with placeholders.
When I first tried (on my own) I made a new HUD BP class and then was able to draw either a texture with a ‘draw texture simple’ node or text with a ‘draw text’ node. I was not able to toggle between the two. However in a a recent test I was able to get a point light to toggle on/off by key or by trigger boxes and toggle colors on a key press.
We want to have a screen for the world map, a overlay for the vehicles systems overview with tabs for different pages (propulsion, weapons, crew etc) as well as a basic HUD thats on whenever your not in the map view where you can click on a telegraph to change ship speeds/click on dive, surface, emergency dive, emergency surface, periscope depth buttons as well as small avatars for the officers that when clicked bring up a small tree that lets you issue orders. Everything will be mapped to hot-keys also.
Animated textures would be a bonus ie. when you click on submerge its highlighted with a stroke around the edges.
In unity I would make a map canvas, a UI/HUD canvas, an overview canvas with multiple pages, and an officers canvas then enable/disable those components (actors) as needed through a script. I see unreal has both the HUD class and ‘Canvas’ based nodes.
Any suggestions for how I would go about building this semi-complicated UI system? I’m posting here not cause I want a give-away, well I wouldnt turn it down, but want to learn how to do it as fast as possible.
Thanks.
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TL;DR how do I make a key and mouse based interactive HUD/UI with multiple components?**
The new way for creating HUDs in UE4 is UMG, which has WYSIWIG elements and then blueprint underneath (or slate C++ --IIRC). You can get pretty far alone just using UMG. As a crash course on UMG I would recommend the Inventory UI with UMG tutorial. This is a good starting point to get an understanding of how exactly UMG works.
The UMG Inventory tutorial Arixsus linked is a good one. It hits a lot of the major points, and moves at a decent pace. That should get you going pretty quickly.
The UMG tutorial was great, better than any digital tutors tuts. Any others would be appreceiated that I should watch. I learned how to bind things to variables, how to create custom events like when button0 is clicked and how to enable/disable certain components.
Any other tuts, they dont even have to be GUI related that you think would benefit someone trying to learn the UE4 API as well as this one did would be greatly appreciated.
best thing to do with UE4 UMG & otherwise is experiment, mess around a lil’ bit, break it then see if ya fix it, you’ll learn a lot. be careful not to ‘just’ do the tutorials try applying it to your individual needs from the start.
sorry I get carried away sometimes, good luck and hope you find the refuge you seek
