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

The Variant Manager panel and Variant Sets

The main tool behind a Product Configurator is the Variant Manager. We use the Variant Manager panel to edit the Level Variant Sets Asset, which allows us to modify the properties of Actors in the level. Each configuration of a part of the product is a Variant, and we can group Variants into Variant Sets.

In the Product Configurator template, each button that appears on the screen when you start the application represents a Variant Set. When you click on one of these Variant Set buttons, other buttons are displayed that represent the Variants that belong to the current Variant Set.

These are the steps to use the Variant Manager panel:

  1. Double-click the VariantSet asset located in the Content > ProductAssets folder to open the Variant Manager panel:

Figure 20.5 – The Level Variant Sets of the template

  1. The Variant Sets and the Variants are listed on the left. In the next screenshot, we...