My vision is to create a virtual language classroom and later a mini-language school. I have no previous experience. Where should I start and what should I learn first?
Hey there @Barleymow1964! Welcome to the community! Fantastic energy, and you’ve got a long road ahead of you. I’ll compile some resources that will help you out, but you’ll definitely be mixing and matching the skills all of these resources go over.
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So first things first, you need to get acquainted with the engine and the basics. Following these Getting Started Tutorials to get a basic handle on some of the early skills needed.
After you get the basics and can manipulate the engine how you’d like, you’re going to need to start thinking about your mechanics. Virtual learning can take many forms, what’s your medium? PC? Mobile? VR? These all have different varying skillsets so to drill down on where to start, you should start with identifying how you want the experience to be. In any case you’ll need to supplement your learning with the documentation itself directly.
This portion of your training is self guided! That’s a link to the primary engine documentation. Whenever you need to know how a piece in engine works, that’s the place to look. If the explanation there isn’t enough, it at least gives you the terminology to search for videos and other resources. This area of your learning is mostly self guided. Start building the basic mechanics of your application (as a singleplayer experience to begin with). You’ll run into roadblocks and have to use docs and videos to solve them. This is normal and healthy for the learning process. Every completed system get’s you closer to your MVP (minimum viable product).
Once you get good at using the engine and can start creating mechanics pretty freely, you’ll want to get more into the complexities to make your dream work. If your virtual classroom is intended to be multiplayer, you’re going to be learning the Replication system in Unreal. It is a built in model to make multiplayer development far easier than almost any other engine! The caveat is that it’s still not incredibly simple until you’ve played with the engine a bit so that’s why I recommended learning to make games in singleplayer first!
My primary resource for multiplayer is this wonderful Networking Compendium:
Cedric makes replication (and a bunch of networking concepts) easy! Though you’ll need to know what you’re looking for. (This was back in UE4 so it doesn’t go over world partition and things like that but a virtual classroom app won’t need it most likely).
Basic Networking Overview:
Multipart (and entertaining) series on replication:
After you’ve got that down, the world (engine) is your oyster! You will still have to look for everything. Just remember, this forum is still an excellent resource whenever you can’t find information online! Good luck!