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

Getting familiar with OOP

Let's learn about some elementary concepts of OOP, such as classes, instances, and inheritance. These concepts will help you learn about various elements of Blueprints Visual Scripting.

Classes

In OOP, a class is a template for creating objects and providing the initial values for state (variables or attributes) and implementations of behavior (events or functions).

Many real-world objects can be thought of in the same way, even if they are unique. As a very simple example, we can think of a person class. In this class, we can have attributes such as name and height, and actions such as move and eat. Using the person class, we can create several objects of this class. Each object represents a person with different values for their name and height attributes.

When we create a Blueprint, we are creating a new class that can be used to create objects in the levels of a game. As the following screenshot shows, the option that appears when creating...