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

Creating Actor Components

When creating an Actor Blueprint, we often add components with encapsulated functionality ready to use, such as Projectile Movement, Static Mesh, and Collision components. We can also create our own Actor Components using Blueprints.

When creating a Blueprint, in the Pick Parent Class panel, there are two COMMON classes that can be used to create components, namely Actor Component and Scene Component:

Figure 18.19 – Creating Actor and Scene Components

The Scene Component is a Child class of the Actor Component that has the Transform structure (location, rotation, and scale). Because of the Transform, a Scene Component can be attached to another Scene Component. We will explore the Scene Component in the next section.

When scripting a component in the EventGraph, you can get a reference of the Actor that is using the component with the Get Owner node:

Figure 18.20 – Getting the reference of...