Time for action – Compiling and testing AwesomeActor

If there are any warnings or errors, look over the code again to make sure everything is spelled correctly and the punctuation is correct. The error message itself should provide a clue as to where to look. It will also give you a line number where the error happened.

One thing we'll notice immediately is that there seems to be a lot of strange objects floating around the level. These are Actor classes that are normally invisible in game, but have sprites that can be seen in the editor. Remember the sprite we added to the default properties of our AwesomeActor? This is where it gets used.

Now let's add our AwesomeActor.

There's our AwesomeActor class!

There's the AwesomeActor, showing the sprite that we put in the default properties of our class! Normally these sprites won't show up in the game, but we didn't put any restrictions on the one in our default properties so we'll be able to see it for now.

So we have our class set up, but is there anything more we can do with it? Usually the first task when learning a new programming language is to make a Hello World program, so let's do that now. Open up our AwesomeActor.uc file in ConTEXT. Let's add some more code.

The first thing we'll do while we're here is make it so our actor doesn't show up in the game but still shows in the editor. We can do this with a simple one line addition to our default properties.

function PostBeginPlay()
{
   `log("Hello World! ==========");
}

PostBeginPlay is a function that is run when an Actor is first created, so it's a good place for our Hello World. The log line we put inside that function will output to a text file so we can see that our class is running correctly. So now, our class should look like this:

class AwesomeActor extends Actor
   placeable;

function PostBeginPlay()
{
   `log("Hello World! ==========");
}

defaultproperties
{
   Begin Object Class=SpriteComponent Name=Sprite
      Sprite=Texture2D'EditorResources.S_NavP'
      HiddenGame=True
   End Object
   Components.Add(Sprite)
}

Before we compile, make sure the editor is closed. The compiler can't delete the old .u file if it's still in use by the editor and we'll get an error.

We don't need to do anything to our AwesomeActor, changes we make to our compiled classes automatically affect any of the actors we've placed in our levels.

There should be Launch.log, Launch2.log, and any number of backups depending on how many times the game, editor or compiler has run. When they run, they create a backup of the existing Launch.log file and start a new one. Whenever more than one is run at the same time, as in the case of us running a game window from the editor, it creates a second file called Launch2.log and so on. So, since we were testing our code from a game window in the editor, let's take a look at Launch2.log.