Book Image

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5 - Third Edition

By : Marcos Romero, Brenden Sewell
5 (1)
Book Image

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5 - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Marcos Romero, Brenden Sewell

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine's Blueprint visual scripting system enables designers to script their games and programmers to create base elements that can be extended by designers. With this book, you'll explore all the features of the Blueprint Editor, along with expert tips, shortcuts, and best practices. The book guides you through using variables, macros, and functions, and helps you learn about object-oriented programming (OOP). You'll discover the Gameplay Framework and advance to learning how Blueprint Communication allows one Blueprint to access information from another Blueprint. Later chapters focus on building a fully functional game step by step. You'll start with a basic first-person shooter (FPS) template, and each chapter will build on the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You'll then progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to more complex systems such as user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. The book demonstrates how to use arrays, maps, enums, and vector operations and introduces the elements needed for VR game development. In the final chapters, you’ll learn how to implement procedural generation and create a product configurator. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build a fully functional game and have the skills required to develop an entertaining experience for your audience.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: Blueprint Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Developing a Game
11
Part 3: Enhancing the Game
16
Part 4: Advanced Blueprints
21
Part 5: Extra Tools

Chapter 13: Data Structures and Flow Control

In Part 3, we learned how to create a basic AI game using Behavior Trees, how to add game states, and how to package a game for distribution.

Part 4 will teach you about advanced Blueprint concepts that will help when developing complex games. We will learn about data structures, flow control, math nodes, and Blueprint tips, and gain an understanding of virtual reality development.

This chapter will explain what data structures are and how they can be used to organize data in Blueprints. We will learn about the concept of containers and how to use arrays, sets, and maps to group multiple elements, as well as other ways to organize data using enumerations, structures, and data tables. In this chapter, we will also see how to control a Blueprint's flow of execution by using various types of flow control nodes.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Exploring different types of containers
  • Exploring other...