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

Tracking the ammo and targets eliminated

To get our UI to respond to the player interacting with the environment, we need to modify the player and target Blueprints. Let's start with the ammo counter to decrease when the player fires a shot from their gun.

Reducing the ammo counter

We need to modify the player fire logic so that the ammo counter is decreased when the player fires their gun. Follow these steps:

  1. In the Content Browser, access the /Content/FirstPersonBP/Blueprints folder and double-click on the FirstPersonCharacter Blueprint.
  2. Find the large series of Blueprint nodes contained within the Spawn projectile comment block. We want to ensure that the counter tracking the player's current ammo count reduces by one each time the player fires a shot. The Blueprint scripting required to do so looks like this:

Figure 7.35 – Decreasing Player Current Ammo

  1. Find the final node in the chain, Play Sound at Location...