What's the common way of checking actor validity before input?

[Demeese]

@Rawalanche

My concerns are that doing it on InputAxis event is just not a right thing to do, so I was wondering if there is a “more right way”

There isn’t really a more “right way” to check validity of an actor. Using the IsValid macro node on the input instead of setting the bool on tick will get rid of the errors its throwing you because, yes, the input fires before the tick. Doing just that will already save you some time, because right now your setting the bool every tick, then checking the bool on 3 input nodes.

@Rawalanche

Regarding the controller, yes I am using player controller and forwarding the input to pawn. That’s necessary here, because in my game, player will be able to control multiple different units and swap between them. That means I want to have input logic on one central place (player controller) and then use those input events and values to to different things on different types of units On top of that, only one pawn can receive input at a time, so this is kind of workaround for that.

I understand what you’re trying to do, and I also thought before that having all input in the controller was the easier way. However, Epic has taken care of that for us in the framework. So to answer to the “right way” is more of a misuse of the game framework.

From an epic developer:

@JamesG

I think you may be getting confused by the name ‘PlayerController’, sorry about that! This is not where the movement logic lives. A ‘controller’ represents a ‘will’ in the game that can ‘possess’ a pawn to control it. A controller could be an AI or a real player, hence the terms AIController and PlayerController. This doc gives an overview of our architecture: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Gameplay/Framework/index.html

To get a basic game up and running, you only really need the Pawn class. It’s the Pawn class that handles the input and moves itself around. Character is a special type of Pawn which includes ‘walking’ movement logic, and is used as the basis for templates like the side-scroller. You only really need to create your own PlayerController to handle logic outside of the Pawn, things like bringing up a mid-game menu for example. Our Character class is quite flexible, there are some great tutorials and example out there of extending it to add dodge, climbing etc. In 4.2 we made it even easier to do things like double jump, and we’ll be releasing a video tutorial to cover that.