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

Managing Actors

The Actor class contains all the functionality an object needs to exist in a Level. Therefore, the Actor class is the parent class for all objects that can be placed or spawned in a Level. In other words, any object that can be placed or spawned in a Level is a subclass of the Actor class. Most of the Blueprints that we'll create will be based on the Actor class itself or its child classes. Therefore, the features we will look at in this section will be useful for these Blueprints.

Referencing Actors

Variable types such as integer, float, and Boolean are known as primitive types because they only store simple values of the specified type. When working with objects or Actors, we use a type of variable known as an object reference. References in Blueprints allow different objects to talk to each other. We will explore this communication in greater detail in Chapter 4, Understanding Blueprint Communication.

For example, the following diagram represents instances...