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

Exploring different types of containers

A container is a type of data structure whose instances can store collections of values or instances. The values in a container must be of the same type. An element of a container can be retrieved later by using a label that the element is associated with.

The containers available in Blueprints are arrays, sets, and maps. To turn a variable into a container, click the icon next to Variable Type and choose one of the containers that appear, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 13.1 – Creating a container

We will start by learning about the most used container type – an array.

Array

An array is a container type that stores one or more values of a specific data type. Thus, a single variable can be used to store multiple values instead of using separate variables for each value.

Arrays provide indexed access to their elements, so the label used to retrieve an element is the element's...