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

Adding objects to our Level

Now, we want to start adding our own objects to the Level. Our goal is to create a simple target Actor that changes color when shot with the included gun and projectile. We can create a simple Actor by following these steps:

  1. In the Level Editor, click the Create button located on the toolbar. Hover over Shapes to display a submenu and drag Cylinder and drop it somewhere in the Level to create an instance:

Figure 5.3 – Adding a Cylinder shape to the Level

This creates a new Cylinder Actor and places it in our Level. You can reposition the Cylinder as you wish by dragging and dropping it. You should see the Actor in the Viewport as well as in the World Outliner panel, where it is named Cylinder by default:

Figure 5.4 – World Outliner showing the added Cylinder

  1. In the Details panel, change the name of the Cylinder instance to CylinderTarget, as shown here:
...