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

Making enemies hear and investigate sounds

Enemies that can only pursue players who walk directly in front of them can easily be avoided. To address this, we will take advantage of the PawnSensing component to have the enemy detect nearby sounds that the player makes. If the player makes a sound within the detection range of an enemy, then the enemy will walk to the location of that sound to investigate. If they catch the player in their sight, they will try to attack; otherwise, they will wait at the location of the sound for a moment before returning to their patrol.

Adding hearing to the Behavior Tree

We will add a sequence of tasks that occur when the enemy hears a sound. We want the enemy to continue attacking the player once they see them, so investigating a sound has a lower priority on the Behavior Tree.

To have the enemy investigate the point where it heard a sound, we will need to create two keys within the blackboard. The HasHeardSound key is of the Boolean type...