What are some of these technical terms in UE4?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Terms I understand:

  • Mesh = Object
  • Texture = Obvious

Terms I don’t understand:

  • Level- Is a level a whole world map you create and once you go next to maybe a door or something, It loads another level? Like going outside a castle, You are in a whole level, once you exit the castle, Does it have to load the map/level for the outside of the map?
  • Blueprint- Used to make Meshes do certain programs, without coding with C++?

I will have more but that is what I am curious about right now

2

Level–your single map file, might be a situation where you have an exterior level and then an interior level, so when you go between them it will go to a loading screen. But there’s also ways to stream levels so that you can add levels together to create a more seamless game.
Blueprint–it’s like a node-based version of coding, instead of having to know all the coding syntax you can just plug things together visually and it will take care of the code itself. In some cases there might be something that you want to do and it might be too complicated for blueprints or there simply isn’t a function in blueprints that you need.

3

So than if I have something too complicated (I doubt I will) Then I will have to use C++ programming which I suck at?

4

Yes , haven’t tried blueprints yet but heard they are pretty good and many things can be achieved by using them , however you always have more control and possibilities using coding . Still blueprints can do amazing things :slight_smile:

5

Is there any terms I should know that you don’t think I know?

6

Blueprints use same APIs as C++, blueprint nodes (except flow control nodes) are references of functions and varables in API, but they need to be flagged to be accessible in Blueprint, so not entire APIs are accessable, for example there no time frameork (FDateTime) accessible thru blueprint, which allows to get current system time and not to mention do math operations on time in more flexible way. API Reference has those function with varbales marked with icons