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

The VRPawn Blueprint

The VRPawn Blueprint represents the user in the Level. This Blueprint contains the logic for input events from the motion controllers, which are the physical devices that the user holds to interact in VR.

The following screenshot shows the Components panel of the VRPawn Blueprint:

Figure 16.3 – The VRPawn components

MotionControllerRight and MotionControllerLeft are Motion Controller components that track motion controller devices. When you move the motion controller device, the data of this movement is sent to the Motion Controller component.

The Camera component is the user view. There is a Static Mesh component named HMD to visually represent the head-mounted display in the Level. When using the spectator camera, we can see a representation of the user because of the HMD and Motion Controller components:

Figure 16.4 – A user representation in the VR template

Another component in VRPawn is...