Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints E-Book

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

Credits

About the Author

My first thanks goes to my friends. Darroch, for your omnipresent optimism and for the great artist that you are, Pelo, for being my tester and a valid reviewer of the book content, Mene, for your bike and genuine friendship, and thank you all to be always there to support me with my choices.

A thank you to my family, a safe haven where I find peace in the bad periods of my life. Thank you, mum, even if you don't approve my career, you are always in my life with your reassuring presence.

About the Reviewer

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Preface

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Unreal Blueprints, introduces you to the Unreal Engine editor and Blueprint graph. We will create the first project on both Unreal Engine and Visual Studio 2013.

Chapter 2, Tic-Tac-Toe, covers a simple game: a player versus player, classic board game. You will learn how to the create a Blueprint graph with nodes and wires.

Chapter 3, C++ Code – PAC-MAN, explains the creation of a classic coin-up game only using the C++ code. You will learn how to communicate between Visual Studio and UE4 in this chapter.

Chapter 4, UFO Run - Play with the Environment Effects, explains the particle effect system and user interface tools by creating an action game, starting from a template offered by the engine.

Chapter 5, Top-Down Shooter, helps you to play with animations and create an artificial intelligence by customizing the assets that are offered by the marketplace.

Chapter 6, A Platform Maze, explains how to use Matinee to create short cinematic clips or move objects around a level. Use the physics to handle ragdolls and destructible objects.

Chapter 7, An Open World Survival Game, creates huge worlds with the terrain manipulation tools that are offered by the engine, populate them with object using the brush tools, and give them a life by creating an inventory system using the knowledge learned during the book.

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Chapter 1. Getting Started with Unreal Blueprints

Blueprint is a high level, visual scripting system that provides an intuitive, node-based interface that can be used to create any type of script events in the Unreal editor. The tools that are provided can be used by level designers, artists, and any non-programmer person, to quickly create and iterate gameplay (or even create entire games) without ever needing to write a line of the code:

For those of you coming from UE3, Blueprint is the evolution of Kismet. It inherits most of the strong keys of the Kismet system, adding the full range of concepts and tools that are generally only available to programmers.

Through the use of Blueprints, anyone can virtually prototype, implement, or modify any gameplay element. Here, we are going to discover how to create most of them. The following is a list of common uses that are covered by this guide:

In order to understand Blueprint, we first need to understand its structure. The following image is an extremely simplistic graph that shows where Blueprint is collocated in a game and who are its parent and child:

Each of these elements can have multiple children and each element has its different type and behavior.

Types of Blueprints

A Level Blueprint is a specialized type of Blueprint that, as the name suggests, acts as a level-wide event graph. A level Blueprint is created by default for each of your levels and can be edited only in the Level Blueprint Editor. This is the only type that cannot be created and there is only one Level Blueprint for each level.

In this Blueprint file we handle the level flow: we can control events, Matinee, and sequences of actions in the form of Function Calls or Flow Control operations.

To open the Level Blueprint for the purpose of editing, click on the Blueprints button in the Level Editor toolbar and select Open Level Blueprint, as follows:

A Blueprint class, simply called Blueprint, is the most used type and you will become familiar with it during this guide. This type allows the content creator to easily add functionality on top of any existing gameplay classes. A Blueprint class extends a parent (either a code parent or another Blueprint class) and can be edited with a visual editor. Any Blueprint class that is created in the editor can be found in Content Browser and can be added to the map as an instance, like any other type of Actor.

The following are the most common Parent Classes that are used when creating a new Blueprint:

Data-only Blueprints are basically Blueprint classes without the node graph. They contain all the properties and components that are inherited from its parent and allow the user to tweak properties or set items with variations without needing to find these properties in a big node graph.

A data-only Blueprint doesn't allow you to add new elements; however, it can be converted in a Blueprint class with just one click, if required:

A Blueprint Interface is similar to an interface in general programming. It allows different types of object to share a common information setup. It is a collection of one or more functions (declarations only, no implementations) that can be added to other Blueprints. A Blueprint Interface needs to be added to a Blueprint class in order to work, and a Blueprint class that has implemented an interface can have and use all of its functions.

A Blueprint Interface can be made in the editor; however, it has limitations as it cannot do the following:

A good example to understand an interface is that a player, a tree, and a concrete wall are three completely different objects but all of them can receive a projectile shot by a weapon. Instead of creating a different function for all of them, an interface can help us by creating a function called onReceiveDamage that is shared (however, implemented differently) by all of them.

A Blueprint Macro Library is a container that holds a collection of Macros or graphs that can be placed as nodes in other Blueprints. They are very handy as they can store the commonly used sequences of nodes with inputs and outputs for execution and data transfer.

Knowing the environment

Open the Unreal Engine Launcher. Under the Library section, choose the version of the engine that you prefer, and launch it, as follows:

The Unreal Project browser will open. By default, you will see the Projects screen. Here, you can see your projects and the samples that you downloaded from the Marketplace. For our purpose, we want to create a brand new and empty project. Under the New Project section, you can choose between the Blueprint or C++ projects in a list of built-in templates:

Due to the nature of Blueprint, the code and Blueprint live happily together. These choices are different in only one way: the C++ project will also create the visual studio solution for your project but each of those choices will generate the same Uproject and the needed files to launch the editor.

Due to this harmony between Blueprint and code, if you choose to create a project from the Blueprint section you can, at any time, generate its C++ project: the engine will create the Visual Studio solution as soon as you add your first code class from the editor (File | Add Code to Project).

Choose a Blank Blueprint project, name it and choose a location (the default is C://Users/Your Name/Documents/Unreal Projects/). Before creating the project you can also set three main aspects of it: the general graphic quality, the device target (mobile, pc, console), and if you want to you can include the Unreal Engine Starter Content in it (the Starter Content contains some useful general purpose assets such as primitive meshes, particle effects, materials, and so on).

For our purpose, we can leave those settings as is and click Create Project.

Welcome to the Unreal Engine 4 editor. You will now see the example map opened and ready for your input in front of you. We are not creating anything fancy right now: we will only explore the user interface of Blueprint and start to learn the basic commands and shortcuts in Blueprint.

There are two ways to create a Blueprint class: from Content Browser or from the top tool bar. The toolbar Blueprint button gives you quick access to the existing modifiable Blueprint classes and you can access to the Level Blueprint only from here. Be aware that from here you can only create the Blueprint class. If you want to create, for example, Blueprint Macro Library, you need to use the Add New button from the Content Browser:

The Add New button and its equivalent mouse command (right-click in the Content Browser), will open a pop-up menu with all the assets that you can create in the engine, as follows:

Most of the asset needed for you projects can be created in the editor. We are now focusing on Blueprint; however, it is worth specifying what we can create from this menu and what needs to be created with an external software:

During studying the examples written in this book, we will see some of them, such as particle systems, navigation meshes, and materials, and some external assets, such as meshes and textures.

Navigate to Add New | Blueprints | Blueprint Class, as follows:

Here, we will choose the Parent Class of our Blueprint script. The editor shows us the Common Classes (we already saw them when previously talking about Blueprint classes); however, the list of parents that we can use is potentially unlimited. If you click on All Classes, in the left-hand side corner at the bottom, you can see a very long list containing all the objects that are available at that moment as a parent for your Blueprint.

Click on Actor and call it BP_Introduction.

Double-click on the BP_Introduction file to open it and we will finally arrive at our Blueprint Editor:

As you can see from the preceding image, the Blueprint Editor is divided into several panels. Each panel is independent; this means that they can be moved, resized, deleted, and duplicated in order to have a workspace that fits your choice.

Let's take a closer look at all of these sections in the following:

Under Unreal, there are different types of variables: typical data types, such as Boolean, Integer, Float, and so on, and more complex reference types, such as objects, Actors, and custom classes. Each type has a unique color for easy identification, as shown in the following table:

Apart from these default data types, there are tons of other custom data types and we will see how to create our custom