Haha, wow, that was a little while ago 
Yeah, and itās still the same issues for when I started out. So practically nothingās changed with Epic. So since they rely on the community so much, I guess Iāll do my part as well, with some super long and in depth training course to get people off to the write start.
You donāt have to download source. You can include source in your engine installs. You can also just sign up and look at it on github. I try to use BP docs first, looking at specific nodes, if the documentation sucks, I go into source and see what is going on with it or look at the hidden comments that sometimes are there.
Obviously it does help if you can understand the C++ logic a bit, but I donāt think itās impossible to figure out sometimes. So yes, it does help quite a bit.
To be honest, between the docs, source and Google, there wasnāt a time where I couldnāt find my answer. And if I couldnāt I would ask on FB or Slack/Discord. Or really just try to figure it out myself. I mean, itās GameDev, sometimes you are not going to be able to use external resources and youāll have to come up with a system that works for you in the end.
I think the biggest issue is just ignorance of the tools devs have in UE4. I am not saying that as an insult, I am still definitely ignorant on some things in the engine (especially anything rendering related), Itās a huge engine, no way any one person can master it. But the biggest issue with Blueprinters, is the lack of how to use the nodes they do have access to. I see so many of the same questions that could just be answered literally by just right-click searching in a BP for a node. The issue is sometimes they just donāt know what it would be called.
Ohā¦So if one person is not able to master this whole engine because the engine is so huge then that might be why I been struggling with trying to build a dialog Choices and Consequences type game up in it because my game uses alot of nesting for the dialogue.
I think its silly that that they decided to lock up the blueprints off into their own separate Classes (containers) instead of just letting these blueprints share information with one another. But no it only allows blueprint communication if you link up all the blueprints together through all their different class and only then will the whole thing start to communicate and work, but to me that form of communication is a bit like Final Fantasy in putting 500 or so bones in their mesh to make their games more over the top and more outrageous and flamboyant so it reminds me of Seymour. Making something more complex than what it should be. I like simple systems, not complex. But the blueprint system uses a complex form of communication so for a widget to communicate to an actor I think you have to get the classes of it first just to talk to it otherwise they canāt seem to communicateā¦ To me the classes concept means putting everything all into their own separate little containers..and the more separate containers that you put them in, the more complex the communication seems to get. So what happened to KISS?
I got nearly 1700 values in my game, because my game has also storyline dialog, between 9 party members and in storyline dialog are many flags to determine different storyline events and the different branches the storylines go in and I was able to do all of this tracking of those values in batch code with the party members, with no troubles but batch is different to blueprints, so when it comes to tracking with the blueprints and trying to nest values inside of other values and arrays inside of each other or trying to save bulk data, well It seems to be a different storyā¦ I see the engine being wide as an ocean but our understanding of the blueprint system being shallow as a puddle because we just donāt
have enough knowledge and depth of them yet so its like the iceberg in the water , you see only part of it on the surface, but not the rest underneath. I donāt really know how you guys go about setting it up to pipe in the choices and consequences widget in dialogue games do you just pipe that choices data somehow into the buttons?.. Anyway as soon as he is able to get his tuts up and running the better, I mean this engine is a headache having to jump through all of the CLASSES hoopla first just to get it to do something for your game. So the fun of Blueprints reminds me of Jax & Daxter II hoop trialsā¦ Difficulty Level: Hardā¦
For example I read the epic doc for how to set up subtitle text to turn it on so you can have subtitles text in your game as well as playing the audio file for your speaker BUT, they only had set it up in just one of the players blueprints,not showed you how to set it up also for the other player blueprint which is what I needed to see the other blueprint settings but they didnāt show all the screenshots details of the other blueprint that I needed to knowā¦So they only showed half of the set up and I think that tut was listed under either intermediate or maybe advancedā¦But since I aint advanced with blueprints and probably also not intermediate either, is why i couldnāt get it properly set up to get that runningā¦ And this type of system also creates some extra files than just your dialogue audio so it wouldnāt be feasble for putting 40,000 lines of dialogue in the text subtitle system but it would be a nice touch to beable to have at least SOME lines of your game dialogue pop up as Text Subtitles on the screen and the rest can be handled by the data table.
I like the engineā¦ except cases where random components start dissapearing from my blueprints when I load map, or hot reload. Or I like it when hot reloading doesnāt stop to work in middle of workā¦ and Iām wondering for 1 hour what is going on. WHen I start debugger I realize that breakpoints are not hitting because it didnt load them. And sometimes they are loaded but the Actors are hooked up on the old dllsā¦ Or when I was 2 hours wondering why isnāt my OverlapEvent not firing (Because I didnāt have UFUNCTION infront of method). Or when I am confused about some random booleans which I have to setup in constructor which arent really documented.