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

Defining the behavior of a Blueprint with events and actions

Most of the time, we will use Blueprints to create new Actors. In Unreal Engine, Actors are game objects that can be added to a level.

Unreal Engine informs the state of a game for an Actor using events. We define how an Actor responds to an event by using actions. Both events and actions are represented by nodes in the Event Graph panel.

Events

To add events to a Blueprint, use the Event Graph panel. Right-click the Event Graph panel to open Context Menu, which has a list of available events and actions. If you need more space in the Event Graph panel, you can right-click and drag to move it to an empty area of Event Graph. Context Menu has a Search bar that can be used to filter the list of nodes. There is also the Context Sensitive checkbox that filters the possible actions based on the node selected. The following screenshot shows Context Menu and some of the events available:

Figure 2.4...