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 other data structures

There are data structures that are not created within a Blueprint class. They are independent auxiliary assets that can be used in a Blueprint. With these data structure assets, you are able to add your own data types to a project and can learn how to use tools that help you deal with a large volume of data in your project.

Let's learn how to create and use enumerations, structures, and data tables.

Enumerations

An enumeration, also known as an enum, is a data type that contains a fixed set of named constants and can be used to define the type of a variable. The value of a variable whose type is an enumeration is restricted to the set of constants defined in the enumeration.

Follow these steps to create an enumeration:

  1. Click the ADD button in the Content Browser, and in the Blueprints submenu, select Enumeration, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 13.32 – Creating an enumeration

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