Custom Character Pawn with Physics Best Practice Questions

millerwjr
Mon, 08 Jan 2024 06:34:54 +0000
Blueprint

Greetings!

I’m relatively new to Unreal and am trying to create a custom pawn class for a 2D action platformer that hovers (with physics). I’m nearly there, but I have a few questions about best practice:

1. I wanted certain (non-collision) parts of the body to hover independently from the main body. In the attached gif, note the eyes and circles near the body trail behind the body movement. I did this by creating a separate actor class with its own procedurally generated spline. In the main body class, I created another 2-point spline linked from an “anchor” object (I left them visible in the attached gif) to the thing that I wanted to trail behind the body movement. My question: Is there a better way to do this? It feels a little procedurally heavy to me and I’d like to keep my event ticks as light as possible.

2. Below is a screenshot of my character class. I left “DefaultSceneRoot” as the base class, as I’m uncertain why I would want to replace this. I see replacement of the parent class happen in many tutorials, but I’m curious if anyone has a good reason as to “Why” I would want to replace the parent class, and “What” would be the best thing to replace it with? I’ve considered both capsules and meshes.

Thank you in advance!

2 posts - 1 participant