Jay Versluis Today I’ve learnt about something called the Game Instance. This is an object that exists only once in our games, is created when the game starts, and torn down only when it ends. It persists across level changes, making it the ideal candidate for storing variables across level loads. It’s one of the first things …
Every language has a way to modify strings: add something to the end, search for something in the middle, concatenate two pieces of text, that sort of thing. C++ is no exception, and Unreal Engine exposes that functionality in Blueprint. Let me give you an example: I wanted to find the name of a material …
I found a very elegant way to animate various properties of the UI widgets we can add to the screen in Unreal Engine. Anything from animating their position to opacity and all kinds of other things can be confined to a mini timeline, then queued programmatically when necessary. Let’s take a look how I’ve animated …
I’ve recently found a much easier way to use Unreal Guy’s animations with the Synty (Polygon) characters, thanks to TC Mabe’s video (and his other one too). This is an updated version of what I’ve described back in March, something I was never really happy with, nor did I fully understand all steps involved. The …
I was looking for a way to turn a string value into a Material Instance. I had hoped that Unreal Engine would have a node for that, but alas it does not. Nevertheless, I needed something that like a key/value lookup and came across Map Variables. Those work exactly like a mini-database right inside the …
For character selections, we may want to replace the skeletal mesh of a character according to a user selection. This comes in handy when we want players to be able to select a different character, or the same character wearing a different outfit. Assuming all meshes share the same skeleton, there’s a Blueprint way of …
Swimming mechanics are a tad tricky to get going in Unreal Engine. I’ve pieced this information together from various cowboy tutorials on YouTube, in the hope that I’ll be able to reproduce the principles without having to watch them again. In this article I’ll make the Third Person Character swim, letting him slowly drift up …
I was surprised to see how easy it was to setup cloth animations in Unreal Engine. It’s as simple as selecting part of a character we’d like to turn into cloth, painting a weight map onto the wafty parts, optionally adjust settings to make the cloth behave the way we want, and Unreal Engine handles …
Post Process volumes are actually very simple to use. They are essentially invisible box volumes that can apply a camera effect that becomes visible as soon our camera enters them. For this example I’ll show you how to create a very simple underwater yet super popular underwater effect that will turn our image blueish when …
I’ve explained how to make a character crouch in a previous article. We can use the same principle to make him (or her) sprint by setting the Max Walk Speed on our character movement. Let me show you how it works. Just like before we need: a Character (I’m using the First Person Character) an …
Line Tracing is a technique that can tell us if an object is in the line of sight, and returns all kinds of data when true. First person shooter games use it all the time, and the principle comes in handy on so many occasions. While it’s not actually that difficult to comprehend, I find …
I’ve just learnt how to let a player character crouch. It’s a little complicated so I thought I’d take some notes in the intricacies. All credit for this goes to Mathew Wadstein and his excellent video tutorial. I’ll explain how to implement the whole process using an interface call, and I’ll show how we can …
Blueprints can get so disorganised over time: the more nodes we add to our Event Graph, the more cluttered and difficult to navigate the screen can get. While there is a way to search for an event across the current class, and there’s the option to split graphs into Functions, there’s also a way to …
I’ve been following EPIC’s Behaviour Tree Quick Start guide and delved into the fascinating world of Blackboards and Behaviour Trees (regardless of the missing u). I thought this way of implementing random walk actions in background characters would come in handy for making the game world come alive. In their example, the behaviour tree is …
I’ve been experimenting with AI Controllers and my Unreal Guys walking towards random locations in the game world. As such I needed a way for them to turn smoothly towards said random locations before they starting to walk. Thankfully I found out about the Find Look At Rotation node. It was exactly the missing piece …
Auto-fire means that you can keep holding down a button and a gun in your game keeps firing bullets at a pre-determined rate. No matter how a single-fire mechanism is setup, we can modify it to work automatically. In this article I’ll show you how it works. For this example I’m using the First Person …
Unreal Guy looks grey by default. He’s made up of two material zones, a rather complex one for his body and another one for his UE4 Logo. If you want to make him look a little different without creating a brand new material, we can override the default value for his Body material like this: …
If our AI controlled foes might chase us a little bit too fast, there’s a way to slow them down or speed them up. The value we need to set is called Max Walk Speed. To get access to this node, start by getting a reference to Character Movement. Then drag off that to get …
Did you know there’s a way to specify an Actor object by something other than an a reference? I thought this was a handy trick. iOS has a similar “hack”, and it can save your bacon on occasion. Tagging an Actor in Blueprint In the Class Defaults of your actor object, head over to Actor …
With spawned objects like bullets and projectiles, there’s a danger of creating a memory leak in our projects. This can happen when things are instantiated and added to the game world, but are never removed. Imagine creating a plethora of flying bullets that are only needed for a moment, but when not removed, they’ll keep …
In this article I’ll show you how we can keep a specific number of actors in the game world, and “replenish them” should they be removed. Imagine a game in which you pick flowers, and over time said flowers automatically re-grow but never exceed 10. Or a game in which the player battles against 5 …
Unreal Engine can make pawns to things, like chase down and follow the player. This is known as AI behaviour, for Artificial Intelligence. It works surprisingly well! Here’s how to set it up – in its simplest form. In principle we have to create an AI controller add the AI controller to the pawn define …
I know how to get an element by its index from an array in C, but I had no idea how this simple feat would work in Unreal Engine Blueprints. Turns out it’s a simple Get Node, however drawing it out and finding it is not so simple. Consider this code, which takes the first …
Interfaces are a C thing. They’re a set of functions that one class can implement so that an action is performed on another class of a potentially different type. Rather than calling a function explicitly on another class, we’re sending a message. If the receiving class knows what to do with it, it’ll react. If …
The beauty of Unreal Engine’s node system is that it’s relatively easy to extend your application code visually. At the same time, this can lead to extremely messy code (literally spaghetti code, considering the amount of noodles on the screen). While such code may be working in the heat of the moment, your future self …
Ever since the past Premiere Pro update, my computer likes to reset itself randomly, particularly during rendering. I should have never hit that update button. Note to self: NEVER update software (or hardware) when everything is working well in principle – no matter how many nags you get. With that mishap on my hands, I …
My friends at Adobe have done it again: remove frequently used features from Photoshop and replace them with stuff nobody has ever asked for. Case in point: the terrible default shapes that we’ve had (and disliked) for the last 30 years. I recently made the mistake of updating Photoshop, with the intention of drawing a …
I’ve been playing with another type of menu, namely the Generic Radial Menus v2.0 by PolyHavoc (available from the Unreal Marketplace). I picked it up as a freebie when it was on offer, but the current $14.99 asking price is certainly a good deal – considering I’d have no idea where to begin writing this …
In this episode I’ll show you how to use WebP images in Photoshop. Currently Photoshop (2020) does not have native support for this file format, so we’ll need a plugin made by the developers (Google) to make it happen. It’s aptly titled WebPShop. While the code is open source, it’s not immediately obvious to non-hackers …
I wanted to implement a scrolling selection menu in Unreal Engine, inspired by the one I’ve seen in The Flame in the Flood. It looked a tad complicated to begin with, but I’ve put I did some digging and found a way that works great. This can be combined with my previous article about Gamepad …